ICG exits continue

Bankrupt CLEC loses four more executives A week before a bankruptcy court begins proceedings about the company's future, ICG Communications announced the departure of four senior executives.

CEO Randall E. Curran last week announced the resignations of ICG's President and Chief Operating Officer William S. Beans and Chief Financial Officer Harry Herbst. Cindy Schonhaut, executive vice president of government and external affairs, and Carla J. Wolin, executive vice president of people services, also resigned.

Beans retains his seat on ICG's board of directors, and the others will be retained as consultants.

In a prepared statement, Curran named no replacements but alluded to "a more direct chain of command." ICG's day-to-day operations will be overseen by Mike Kallet, executive vice president of operations; David Hurtado, senior vice president of telephony operations; Darlinda Coe, senior vice president of network support; and Gary Lindgren, senior vice president of engineering.

Curran was unavailable for comment. Beans, Herbst and Wolin could not be reached for comment. Schonhaut declined to comment.

Meanwhile, lawyers for ICG and its legion of creditors are scheduled to gather in a Wilmington, Del., courtroom Dec. 19 to decide how ICG will resolve its debts. The company continues operating and, theoretically, might yet survive as an independent company. It also might be bought, though market conditions make such a transaction difficult.

"Given the fundamental re-examination of their own business models that many IXCs are undergoing, I'm not sure that acquiring ICG whole would make much sense," said Tom Deaton, vice president of technical evaluation services for RHK. "That doesn't mean somebody might not be interested in the backbone."

ICG acquired its Internet backbone when it bought Netcom On-Line Communication Services in 1998. In January 1999, ICG sold NetCom's consumer business and kept the backbone.

"All we wanted was the damn network," then president J. Shelby Bryan - and later chairman and CEO - told reporters at the time.

Aryeh Bourkoff, director of media and telecommunications high-yield research at UBS Warburg, doesn't see any white knights saving the day. "Overall, this is a generally difficult environment for strategic equity," he said. "That being said, yeah, there are some assets [at ICG] that might have some buyers. Some of the local assets look interesting. The most likely scenario for ICG is to sell its assets on a piecemeal basis."

The man now in charge of those assets is a stark contrast to Bryan. Until his recent difficulties, Bryan sought the spotlight, not just in trade and business publications, but in the society pages as well.

Though the company is based in Colorado, Bryan lived in New York, where his fund-raising activities, love affair with Vogue editor Anna Wintour and the consequent breakup of his marriage were common fodder in the New York tabloids.

Curran comes from the Old Economy, having served as CEO of Thermadyne Holdings, a St. Louis-based welding products company, until he left "to pursue other interests" in June. He was a Thermadyne employee for 13 years, and neither he nor his company seem to have made much of an impression - positive or negative - on local business reporters.

While Curran and his colleagues struggle with ICG's operations and lawyers circle in Wilmington, the other legal shoe is waiting to fall in Denver, where 26 separate class-action lawsuits are pending against ICG and two of its former officers.

While the bankruptcy filing stopped litigation against ICG, the suits against Bryan and former President and Chief Operating Officer John Kane are frozen because "we have no return of service for those individuals," according to court clerk Judy Poor. In other words, the 26 law firms naming them as defendants have not served Kane and Bryan. "Until that happens, we're not going to do anything," Poor said.