Randomly Noted

A good old-fashioned, flip-around-the LBO via IPO could be coming our way soon. And it will be another test of how resilient the markets are today.

LRI Holdings plans to sel up to $200 million of shares in an initial offering underwritten by Credit Suisse. The exact number of shares or price talk range have not been set. LRI is the parent of Logan’s Roadhouse, a chain of restaurants that have grown impressively over the past decade – it today has 211 restaurants. It’s a steakhouse and, as the company says in its preliminary prospectus, was inspired by the roadside-style restaurants that populated Route 66 in the 1930s and 1940s.

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BP PLC has reached the point in the Gulf oil spill crisis in which its responsibility for the environmental disaster permits outsiders to feel entitled to comment on every aspect of the oil giant’s business.

So a public debate ensues about whether BP should continue to pay a dividend to investors when the oil is still leaking and the eventual level of BP’s liability and costs can’t yet be known.

And, as cited in an article by Suzanne Vranica in today’s Wall Street Journal, a debate ensues about whether the company should have spent a reported $50 million for image-improvement advertising on television.

On that latter point, whether you think the spending ethically justified or not, it certainly is premature.

Despite the image experts Vranica lists as being hired by BP, the final line of the article to me is the most telling.

“Until the leak is stopped, no amount of advertising or PR will help,” said Chris Gidez, U.S. director of crisis communications at Hill & Knowlton NY, as quoted by the Journal.

For BP that stop has to happen before any image repair work can be successfully undertaken.

Nothing can compete with the images of the continually spewing oil from the ocean floor and the oil-drenched birds.