(AP) — Newspaper and television company Freedom Communications filed a new bankruptcy-reorganization plan on Thursday that makes concessions to its lower-tier, unsecured creditors and eliminates the 2 percent stake that the current owners were to retain.

The new plan for Freedom to emerge from Chapter 11 protection would leave no equity with the current owners — the descendants of Freedom founder R.C. Hoiles and the investment firms Blackstone Group LP and Providence Equity Partners.

Full ownership of the company would now go to secured lenders, which include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, General Electric Capital Corp., Royal Bank of Scotland PLC, and Wachovia Bank. In return, those lenders would cut the amount of debt owed them by Freedom to $325 million from $770 million.

The plan is subject to the approval of a federal bankruptcy judge in Wilmington, Del.

Burl Osborne, Freedom's interim CEO, told The Associated Press he doesn't expect to stay on the job for very long after the lenders pick a new board in March.

"I have told the lenders I am willing to help in the transition," he said late Thursday. "It's conceiveable that they may want me to stay awhile and it's conceiveable they may want me to leave right away."

Osborne, 72, has been leading Freedom since last summer. He is a former AP chairman.

Messages left with the banks were not immediately returned Thursday.

Blackstone and Providence Equity as well as members of the Hoiles family also did not immediately respond to messages.

Freedom Communications Holdings Inc., which publishes The Orange County Register in California and more than two dozen other dailies, filed for bankruptcy protection last September. Like other publishers, the company saw revenue tumble as the recession deepened and readers and advertisers shifted to the Web.

Freedom's Chapter 11 filing had been part of a prepackaged plan approved by a majority of the company's lenders. Under that plan, the family and two investment firms that own Freedom would have been left with no more than a 2 percent stake in the company. The rest of the stock would have gone to a group of 27 top-tier lenders in exchange for reducing debt. Unsecured lenders would have shared a pot of $5 million.

But attorneys for a committee of those lenders complained that Freedom's initial plan wrongly benefited shareholders who control the board of directors at the expense of unsecured creditors.

Under the new plan, unsecured lenders would be split into three groups and would get well above the initial $5 million offered, Freedom spokesman Robert Emmers said.

Trade creditors — the businesses that continue to provide critical supplies such as news print and ink under old contracts — would get $5.5 million, though Emmers said the company hasn't determined how that total would be split within that group.

About 130 pension holders included as unsecured creditors would get 70 percent of their original pensions.

And the rest of the unsecured lenders would get a $14.5 million trust fund, which would either distribute the money among them or use it to finance litigation on the company's behalf against current and former directors. Emmers could not speculate on what claims the trust might pursue, but said Freedom's insurance policy could potentially cover damages.

The main group of unsecured creditors covered by the trust are members of a class-action lawsuit brought by newspaper carriers at The Orange County Register. Freedom agreed to pay the carriers $28.9 million last year to settle claims that they should have been counted as employees instead of contractors from July 1999 to August 2009. The settlement would have been final Sept. 14, but Freedom filed for Chapter 11 protection on Sept. 1, allowing the company to reclaim the money.

Alan J. Bell, a former Freedom CEO acting as a spokesman for the unsecured creditors, said negotiations over the past four months have been intense.

"Everybody will grouse a little about how it isn't perfect," he said. "But that's how you get to a deal."

___

AP Business Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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