[sbj99]

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If Party only has $96 million cash on hand, where were they getting the money for the dividend in the first place? So they obviously have to have more money than that. Also, it's not necessarily the sign of a bad company if you don't have cash on hand to cover 80% of your customers. A well run company has cash on hand to cover the worst possible scenario, and has the ability to get more money if need be. And then they put the excess money to work. Ideally Party would have seperate accounts to cover deposits, like Stars claims to. But in any case, $96 million in cash does not add up for a company that just canceled a dividend that was going to give away more than that.

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The idea of the dividend was simply related to the big cashflow. They have been generating so much cash there was no reason to keep it on the books. Other than the legislation risk obviously. But this explains why they paid a dividend. They generated $380m cash from operations in the first 6 months of the year.

The other part I wonder about is if they saw the risk of the lenders pulling out if legislation went through cutting them off from the US. I'm not saying they'll pull out but definitely some risk there, and at best unfavorable terms.