Well, that was quick.
Peregrine Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: PPHM) shares are diving once again this morning following an SEC filing disclosing what many investors already feared: It defaulted on a $30 million loan agreement entered into on Aug. 30. For those of you counting, that's less than a month from underwriting to default!
The loan -- which was underwritten by a consortium of lenders including Oxford Finance, Silicon Valley Bank, and MidCap Financial SBIC -- included a number of qualifying "events of default." Here's the legalese (emphasis added):
The Loan Agreement also includes events of default, including, among other things, payment defaults, breaches of representations, warranties or covenants, certain bankruptcy events, the failure to achieve a positive End of Phase II meeting by June 30, 2013 and certain material adverse changes, including a material impairment of the perfection or priority of the Lenders' lien.
Rewind back to Monday, and you might remember a 78% sell-off in shares after the company disclosed a critical error in its phase 2 data for lead drug candidate bavituximab. As you might expect, it wasn't hard for the lenders to argue that a "material adverse change" had occured.
Peregrine didn't object, and on Tuesday, it returned the $15 million it had drawn on the loan, along with accrued interest and a $975,000 "final payment fee." All told, the damage was right around $16 million. Assuming the company doesn't attempt to access capital through an equity offering, it now expects to have enough cash to operate through the end of April 2013, about seven months.
