Puerto Rico in Distress

ABI Analysis

Scrub Island Development Group Ltd., the owner of a British Virgin Islands luxury resort, sought bankruptcy protection to end a receivership it claims was secretly put in place by its lender, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The company listed debt and assets of more than $100 million each in chapter 11 documents filed on Tuesday.

Puerto Rico’s El Vocero newspaper could soon get a new owner that would preserve its voice on the 3.6 million-resident island, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. A trustee in charge of the newspaper’s bankruptcy case has proposed to hold a public auction on Nov. 22.

Puerto Rico’s current debt, between $52 billion and $70 billion, is the third-largest behind California’s and New York’s, despite a far smaller and poorer population, according to an analysis in the recent edition of The Economist. In America’s 50 states the average ratio of state debt to personal income is 3.4 percent.

Puerto Rico’s struggling Spanish-language newspaper El Vocero has a survival strategy to avoid becoming yet another victim of the consolidation wave sweeping the media industry, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.