Report: Alon is Big West refinery's sole bidder
| Tuesday, Mar 16 2010 06:13 PM
Last Updated Tuesday, Mar 16 2010 06:50 PM
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The Big West of California refinery on Rosedale Highway.
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The deadline for submitting a bid on Big West refinery reportedly passed Tuesday with no new offers coming in, increasing chances that the U.S. subsidiary of Alon Israel Oil Co. Ltd. will buy the plant.
An auction has been set for Friday to determine whether Alon's leading bid of $40 million would prevail. The winning bidder is scheduled to be decided Tuesday in bankruptcy court.
With no competing offers, the Rosedale Highway refinery's fate now appears to lie with the judge overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings of the plant's Utah-based owner, Flying J Inc.
Representatives of Flying J and Alon declined to comment.
A report Tuesday by Oil Price Information Service cited an unnamed attorney with Kirkland & Ellis LLP, the Chicago-based law firm representing Flying J in bankruptcy court, as saying no other firms have filed bids.
That information was supposed to be kept confidential -- probably until Friday at the soonest -- said John W. Kim, an attorney with the Los Angeles law firm Nossaman LLP, which represents a number of Flying J's creditors. He said he could not determine whether any new bids were submitted.
"Assuming there are no other bids out there, then it's very possible Alon's bid may be considered the highest and best offer," Kim said. "But we won't know that for sure until the 23rd" of this month, which is coming Tuesday.
An official at the refinery's union, Ed Huhn, said last year that 113 groups initially expressed interest in possibly buying Big West. He said the list was later narrowed to about 30 "serious" investors.
Alon announced last month that it hopes to connect Big West by pipeline to a refinery complex it owns in Los Angeles County. It provided few details.
But in an earnings call March 4, the Dallas-based subsidiary's CEO elaborated somewhat, saying the mothballed refinery could be restarted at relatively low cost. He declined to provide an estimate of how long it would take to open a pipeline to the refinery, or state whether Alon intends to operate Big West independently in the meantime.
