Calpine to Consider Asset Sale

Power plant owner Calpine Corp., which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, will consider selling assets as part of its restructuring, Chief Executive Robert May said Friday.

The company’s management will use the coming months to determine which assets and business lines it should keep and which it can do without, May told creditors at a meeting in New York.

May didn’t specify which assets might be sold. Calpine owns more than 90 power plants.

“We are really taking a hard look at the company and deciding what are the areas we are going to focus on,” May said. “All other opportunities we will find a way to hopefully monetize and shed the assets.”

Calpine filed for bankruptcy protection in December with more than $22.5 billion in short-term and long-term debt. The San Jose-based company is developing a plan to restructure the debt, May said.

The U.S. Trustee, an arm of the Justice Department, appointed seven creditors Friday to a committee representing all of Calpine’s unsecured creditors. The panel comprises HSBC Bank USA, Wilmington Trust Co., Franklin Advisers Inc., Acadia Power Partners, Amerada Hess Corp., SPO Partners & Co. and Transcanada Pipelines Ltd.

Wilmington Trust is listed in court papers as Calpine’s largest unsecured creditor, with at least seven claims totaling $4.65 billion. The company said in December that it was trustee for publicly traded debt owned by others and owns no Calpine debt itself.

The creditors’ committee typically negotiates the terms of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization plan, including how much creditors will be repaid. The panel’s first order of business will be to hire legal and financial advisors.