The Woodlands, Texas-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. announced that it is selling a large number of its smaller oil and natural-gas properties in Texas and Oklahoma in return for $850 million and a stake in two Wyoming producing fields. Merit Energy Co., a Dallas-based privately held company, is buying the majority of the properties.
With the sale, Anadarko is nearing its previously announced goal of selling off $2.5 billion in North American assets. It plans to use the proceeds to lower debt and refocus on a plan to develop overseas and deepwater Gulf of Mexico exploration.
The properties Anadarko is selling represent 30% of its fields world-wide, but only 4% of proven reserves and 7% of current production. The deal is scheduled to close by the beginning of December.
Merit owns and operates oil and natural-gas fields with $2.1 billion in oil and natural-gas reserves. The company had raised $2.5 billion for additional purchases of oil and gas properties.
It’s too early to say whether Anadarko’s ambitious plan to restructure the company is going to work. However, I am pulling for them. It’s always refreshing to see management of a company address a daunting problem — i.e., the uninviting future of an independent E&P company treading water while living off of declining reserves — and come up with a creative plan to redirect the company toward a potentially more profitable goal. The plan is not without substantial risk, but given Anadarko’s alternatives, it makes a lot of sense to me.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Walt Disney Co.’s CEO, Michael Eisner, will retire in 2006 at the end of the current term of his contract with the company.
Here is the Journal ($) article on Mr. Eisner decision, which is also an excellent overview of his tenure at Disney. My sense is that Mr. Eisner is similar to a good football coach who builds a solid program from one that was floundering, but who holds on to his job for too long, creating disunity among supporters of the program, some of whom remain loyal to him for his past successes and others who recognize that he does not know when to quit and want to fire him.

One of the favorite resorts of Texas families is the Hyatt Hill Country Resort in San Antonio.
Now it appears that another Hyatt resort project between Austin and Bastrop will become a reality. Dallas-based Woodbine Development Corp. has closed a $74.3 million construction and permanent loan with Prudential Mortgage Capital for the construction of the $135 million Hyatt project.
The resort will be located on 656 acres of Bastrop County land that Woodbine bought from the Lower Colorado River Authority in March. The resort site, which adjoins LCRA’s 1,110-acre McKinney Roughs Nature Park, will utilize 405 acres of this land, including one mile of Colorado River frontage. The remaining 251 acres are being reserved for future development.
The Hyatt site is 13 miles from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. It will include a 500-room hotel, an 18-hole golf course, a manmade river pool, and hiking and equestrian trails.

Former CSFB Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone was sentenced to 18 months in prison for obstructing a probe of how IPO stocks were doled out. The sentencing follows his obstruction conviction in May, which was largely based on an e-mail he sent underlings that encouraged them to obey document-management procedures that prosecutors alleged would have destroyed evidence sought by investigators.
The punishment was well above federal guidelines, which called for no more than 16 months, and from a probation department recommendation of 10 months, half on supervised release.
Mr. Quattrone, who is 48, is the highest-profile Wall Street figure to face prison since junk-bond king Michael Milken was given a 10-year sentence (later reduced) for alleged securities-fraud violations nearly a decade ago.
In handing down the sentence, U.S. District Judge Richard Owen granted a prosecution request to lengthen Mr. Quattrone’s sentence to between 15 and 21 months on the grounds that he had committed perjury when he testified at his trial. The judge based his decision on Mr. Quattrone’s denial before the jury that he intended to obstruct investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and a federal grand jury. Mr. Quattrone’s attorneys argued that the alleged perjury was not proved before a jury. But Judge Owen ruled that it was clear to him that Mr. Quattrone’s denial that he intended to obstruct justice was not true and commented that Mr. Quattrone could have avoided the perjury issue by not taking the witness stand.
H’mm. A criminal defendant should not take the stand to defend himself from a criminal charges because he might commit another criminal offense that the judge will convict him of during sentencing without a trial? Let’s see how that proposition plays out on appeal.
At any rate, at least Judge Owen agreed to allow Mr. Quattrone to serve his time at the federal minimum-security prison camp in Lompoc, Calif. However, Judge Owen denied Mr. Quattrone’s request to remain free pending appeal and ordered him to surrender on October 28.
A jury convicted Mr. Quattrone in May of obstructing a government investigation into how CSFB allocated shares of hot IPO stocks. Prosecutors charged that Mr. Quattrone obstructed the investigation when he forwarded a single e-mail to his subordinates advising them to clean-up files per the bank’s document-management policies soon after he learned about the federal grand-jury investigation. A first trial last October ended in a hung jury.
Mr. Quattrone still faces a possible lifetime ban from the securities industry under charges pending against him by the National Association of Securities Dealers and the SEC. His former firm CSFB paid $100 million in 2002, without admitting wrongdoing, to settle charges that the SEC and NASD had brought against the firm.

TXU Energy, the unregulated arm of Dallas-based TXU Corp., last month notified 185,000 of its Texas electricity customers that increases in natural-gas prices would require the company to adjust rates. But in a new rate-setting tactic for the electric-utilities industry, TXU Energy also plans to impose a bigger rate increase for its customers with the lowest credit scores based on numeric rankings of credit-worthiness that take into account a customer’s history of paying electricity, telephone and cable bills.
Predictably, consumer advocates are not pleased. “If they get away with this, others will follow,” said Randy Chapman, executive director of the Texas Legal Services Center, a legal-aid program that helped uncover TXU’s credit-scoring practice, which was reported by the Dallas Morning News. Another state-funded consumer advocate in Texas is reportedly preparing to file a formal complaint with the Texas Public Utility Commission asking it to issue an emergency order preventing TXU, which is both the biggest utility and biggest competitive supplier in the state, from implementing the rate changes.
Imagine the audacity of a company trying to take away the right of people who do not pay their bills timely to have people who do subsidize the cost of their tardiness.
The Texas electricity market was deregulated in 2002, allowing customers to jump from one provider to another where available. The new TXU pricing arrangement doesn’t affect customers that get service from TXU Corp. in its traditional territory in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Rates there continue to be regulated by the state during the transition from a fully regulated to a deregulated market.
Instead, the credit scoring has been applied to TXU Energy customers in portions of the state where TXU is seeking new customers. TXU Energy lured many of those customers away from utilities with the inducement of discounts.
The insurance industry has for years used credit scores as a tool to predict losses and help set premiums. A study prepared last year for the state of Texas by the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas in Austin found a correlation between insurance claims and low credit scores. Credit tools have been used by the electric industry to set deposits but haven’t been used to set actual rates. Traditionally, rates were based on the cost of furnishing service to broad customer classes, such as residential ratepayers.
However, under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, companies that use credit information as a basis of adverse decisions often are required to disclose that fact to consumers. It does not appear that TXU has complied with the Act, at least yet.
Many states that have deregulated their retail electricity markets still require incumbent utilities to offer rates that serve as a benchmark for prices offered by competing suppliers. But those government-mandated rates expire in Texas in 2007 for residential customers.
Under the TXU program, electricity rates will be raised for 185,000 customers, based on higher gas prices. But they will be raised most sharply for roughly 55,000 residential and small-business customers with poor credit scores. That’s about 30% of the accounts that TXU Energy now serves in competition with incumbent utilities.
Stay tuned as this football begins to be tossed around the political playing field.