⚡️Update: PG&E Corporation ($PCG)⚡️

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Per The Wall Street Journal:

PG&E Corp. has reached a settlement with victims of the wildfires that pushed California’s largest utility into bankruptcy, agreeing to pay them $13.5 billion in damages.

The pact removes a significant obstacle to PG&E’s emergence from chapter 11 protection and includes reforms meant to address criticism that the company enriched shareholders while leaving customers exposed to danger from aged, unsafe equipment.

PG&E bowed to demands for more money for fire victims and gave in to pressure from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to improve its corporate governance and implement stricter safety protocols.

The best part: the settlement is payable half in cash and half in stock. All we have to say is:

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⚡️Newsflash: PG&E Corporation⚡️

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You got cute. You invested in the equity. Now you may be up sh*t’s creek.

With each passing day and each damaged structure, a growing administrative expense claim is squeezing any hope of equity value and potentially threatening the backstop commitments received back in…wait…carry the one…FRIKKEN SEPTEMBER. We’re old enough to remember reading this somewhere:

Interestingly, Abrams & Knighthead have conditioned their support on, among other things, two key components: (1) a “wildfire claims cap” of $17.9mm and (2) no “occurrence of one or more wildfires in the Debtors’ service territory after the Petition Date and prior to January 1, 2020 that is asserted by any person to arise out of the Debtors’ activities and that destroys or damages more than 500 Structures.” Will global warming blow up this deal? Note: the Thomas Fire ripped through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in December 2017, wrecking 281k acres, 1063 structures, and killing 23 people. 

Oh right. That was us: we wrote that. We really wish that hadn’t aged so well.

PG&E Picks Up the Pace (Long Seth Klarman)

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Well, that sure didn’t last long. In “Is it a Plan or a Placeholder?,” we discussed the recently proposed plan of reorganization filed by PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electric Company ($PCG). We wrote:

Moreover, the plan also depends on the “Subrogation Wildfire Claims” — claims “held by insurers or similar entities in connection with payments made to others on account of damages or losses arising from such wildfires” — coming in at a max $8.5b.[] Will these numbers hold? We suspect the answer is an emphatic ‘no.’

As much as we like being right, we certainly weren’t expecting it to happen so soon.

A mere few days after filing its plan of reorganization, PG&E announced an $11b settlement with parties representing 85% of the Subrogation Wildfire Claims. This settlement, still subject to the approval of the Bankruptcy Court, “would satisfy and discharge all insurance subrogation claims against the Debtors arising from the 2017 Northern California wildfires and the 2018 Camp fire.” Per Reuters:

The company also amended its equity financing commitment agreements to accommodate the claims, and reaffirmed its $14 billion equity financing commitment target for its reorganization plan.

One amendment was an increase in the “Wildfire Claims Cap” to $18.9b from $17.9b. The debtors understand the signaling here: with the subrogation claimants almost immediately getting $2.5b more than what was in the plan, they prudently indexed higher to account for wildfire claimant expectations.

Despite the assumption of $3.5b more in liabilities (exclusive of earlier settlements), this is a net positive for PG&E. They removed one constituency from the board (assuming they don’t trade out of their claims and blow up the settlement), got a legitimate impaired accepting class to help usher the plan through, and moved themselves closer to a global settlement.

Anyway, the stock — somewhat mysteriously considering the marked INCREASE in liabilities — reacted favorably to the news, up over 11% on the week and erasing Monday’s post-plan blistering:

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⚡️Is PG&E in Trouble?⚡️

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PG&E Reported Earnings (Long Climate Change)

Long time PETITION readers know that our general theme is “disruption, from the vantage point of the disrupted.” Disruption can come in various forms. In many cases it comes from technological innovation. The dreaded “Amazon Effect” that everyone is so tired of hearing about falls into this category. But as we’ve said time and time again, mobile e-commerce is a big part of that story and that would never have been made possible — and perhaps brick-and-mortar would still be intact — if it weren’t for the Apple Iphone ($AAPL), for Shopify ($SHOP), and for Instagram ($FB), among many other disrupters. Today’s innovations are leading indicators for tomorrow’s bankruptcies.

Disruption — and, no, we don’t always use this term in the Clayton Christensen sense — can come in other forms. There can be regulatory and/or legislative disruption, political disruption, environmental disruption, etc. In the case of PG&E — short for Pacific Gas and Electric Company — it may be all of the above.

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