Washington's own Intelsat, the world's biggest and most respected satellite operator, is on the auction block again.
Only three years ago, Intelsat was scooped up by a quartet of private-equity firms that put a modest $515 million of their own money into the deal and borrowed the rest. Within a year, they'd taken all their cash out in the form of dividends and management fees. Last year they paid $3.2 billion, all of it borrowed, to buy rival PanAmSat from another group of private-equity firms, which in the space of a year had managed to turn an investment of about $500 million into a $3 billion gain.
