I hadn't thought about what that charge would do to the value of the Getty businesses. The cash grab looks like an admission that they can't sell the business on, as planned, so they've just cut their losses by taking $500m.

What did H&F pay for it when they bought it? An awful lot more than that, wasn't it? I guess they didn't understand the problems that were causing Getty's share price collapse and thought they could fix something that was outside their control. Now they're just making things worse with desperate measures to try to redirect all the income into the company's coffers to try to pay off the debt.