Market Turmoil Pressures Redstone

After spending decades building a huge and diverse media empire, Sumner Redstone was shocked to find himself in an unusually vulnerable position late last week, forced to sell off a big chunk of his holdings in Viacom and CBS. Redstone had used his prized stakes in those two publicly held media giants, which he controls, to help back a $1.6 billion loan to expand his family's movie-theater chain, among other things. On Monday, Redstone's family holding company, National Amusements, announced it had completed the sale of $233 million of Viacom and CBS shares in the market to avoid breaching its loan covenants. He was caught off guard by the turn of events, and National Amusements spent much of the weekend negotiating with its banks and assessing its funding options. After indicating Friday it would sell shares worth $400 million, it ultimately succeeded in curbing the amount of stock it had to sell.