SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The auction for bankrupt electronic retailer RadioShack's brand and customer data has closed with the Standard General hedge fund posting a winning bid of $26.2 million after objections piled up to their sale.
Standard General affiliate General Wireless, which had already bought more than 1,700 RadioShack stores, on Tuesday won the auction with the offer, well over its initial bid of $15 million on Monday, Adrienne Walker, a lawyer with Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, said on Wednesday.
Walker had been tracking the sale for a group of RadioShack's U.S. independent dealers and franchisees. They had objected to the sale over concerns about whether they could continue to use the RadioShack trademark and whether a buyer of the customer data will be subject to their privacy policies.
Several state officials had also raised consumer privacy concerns, and Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) chimed in last week with a filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, that said its reseller agreement with RadioShack protects information collected by the retailer during sales of Apple products.
Standard General and RadioShack were not immediately available to comment on the auction.
RadioShack, forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February by competition from online and bricks-and-mortar rivals, won court approval in March to sell part of its business to General Wireless. Most of RadioShack's surviving stores will be co-branded with cellular phone provider Sprint Corp.
The sale of the intellectual property assets still requires bankruptcy court approval. A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for May 20 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.
The case is In Re: RadioShack Corp, Case No. 15-10197, in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware.