After a week spent looking for a rescue buoy, an Ontario court gave the oldest company in Canada the authorization to start liquidating all stores except six Monday.
The Friday approval of the Ontario Superior Court judge, Peter Osborne, allows the retailer to start selling stocks on most of his 80 Hudson’s Bay Stores, three Fifth Avenue Squares and 13 SAKS SAKS off the 5th stores in Canada.
“This is the art of the possible and we are where we are today,” Osborne said on Friday.
“In my opinion, there is no other alternative.”
The six stores saved from the liquidation sale include the flagship of rue Yonge in Toronto, as well as a store of the city Yorkdale in the city and another north of the Hillcrest shopping center in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The other three Montreal elements, the Laval Mall and Point-Claire crossroads, Qué.
The company did not say how important the discounts will be during the liquidation on June 15. It will cancel all liquidation stores by June 30.
This decision could allow some of the 9,364 jobs that would have been lost if the company had moved to liquidate all of its stores, which was the plan until recent sales exceed expectations, which allows it to keep six in life.
“If a solution may be found, it is possible to withdraw additional liquidation stores, but if a restructuring solution is not found very quickly, (the six) will be added to the liquidation sale,” said Hudson bay lawyer on Friday.
The decision marks a glimmer of hope for the company, which filed a request for the protection of creditors on March 7. The demand has shown that the company faced significant financial challenges and desperately needed money to continue to make basic payments that support the company.
Although it suffers from a reduction in consumption expenses, Canada’s trade tensions and the United States and a post-pandemic slide in the traffic of downtown stores, he postponed payments to owners and suppliers and finally had to use funding, which led him to liquidation.
Six stores can now be saved because the imminent liquidation has triggered a wave of customer sales that seek to break the famous Hudson’s Bay Stripes products and other products and home clothes.
The species from sales will allow the company to pay a joint venture with Riocan Real Estate Investment Trust, of which it has real estate, up to $ 7 million per month in rent. He can now also reimburse $ 16 million in funding he received from Restore Capital earlier in the month to keep it afloat.
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Taylor said on Friday that the company will continue to “work hard” to find a “longer -term solution” for its financial problems, but warned the window to achieve this “very short remains”.
Although the company performs the work, it will launch a sales process for assets like its leases and that Canadians will see offers in the stores that will be attributed.
Whether they buy in person or online, they will find Hudson’s Bay interrupted its loyalty program, which has 8.2 million Canadian members with approximately $ 58.5 million unused points. He will stop accepting the gift cards in the process of 24.2 million dollars that consumers have after April 6.
All sales will be dismantling in liquidation stores, says Hudson’s Bay.
To reach a judgment, Osborne had to reconcile the way in which the company could liquidate its inventory, continue more funding and also request a buyer for precious assets such as its leases or even the intellectual property associated with its name or its striped products.
“I want to make sure that we have not sold jewelry in the crown … So to make a better result impossible,” he said in court earlier this week, a few hours before reserving his judgment for the day and urged the lawyers he had heard of to “reduce the temperature”.
The dozens of procedures of the procedures during the week represented all the elevator companies that Hudson’s Bay had not paid to the owners.
The owners feared that a liquidation does not only leave their shopping centers and properties with huge spaces to be filled, but would also hinder pedestrian traffic to other tenants whose products would become less attractive, compared to the reduced prices of the bay.
The lawyer for Hudson’s Bay, Taylor, used his appearances to promise that the company “would throw the net as wide as possible” to find donors that could recover or rebuild the company.
He declared earlier this week that he had approached 19 lenders, but so far, “the business efforts have failed”, requiring a liquidation.
Andrew Hatnay, a lawyer representative of employees, said on several occasions in court that he thought that the whole process was going too quickly because the company went from the protection of creditors to a full sale in about a week.
He did not see six stores save as a reason for celebration.
“We will see how it works but even … if they withdraw something from their hat, stores are still falling,” he said in court.
“This is not good news.”
The stake, he said, were not only thousands of jobs, but benefits, pensions and allowances. There are 21,000 past and current employees, covering Hudson’s bay, SAKS FIFTH Avenue and previous Simpsons, Kmart Canada and Zellers, in the pension plan, which, according to court documents, is currently fully funded.
Employees say they are not expecting a starting indemnity, which Hatnay estimates could have represented 100 million collective dollars.
“It’s melancholy,” he told the judge.
“This is the disappearance of HBC slowly but surely.”
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press