A new TV ad by Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele heats up the campaign for the Aug. 10 Republican gubernatorial primary by blasting GOP front-runner Tom Foley's 1985 purchase and subsequent management of The Bibb Co., a Georgia textile manufacturing company that went into bankruptcy a decade later and finally closed.
The 30-second ad, which began running Friday, picks up on the subject of a May 21 Courant story about Foley's Bibb venture. Foley, a Greenwich multimillionaire businessman, had touted that venture as a success story, but his junk-bond-financed leveraged buyout of Bibb ended with him relinquishing executive control and most of his 95 percent stake in the company in 1996. New management sold the company and 1998 brought the closing of its huge and renowned plant, in the "company town" of Bibb City on the outskirts of Columbus, Georgia.
The new Fedele ad shows desolate scenes of a town that once centered around a now-closed plant, and it carries criticism of Foley by elderly people identified as former Bibb workers in Georgia who were interviewed by the campaign's production crew. "Tom Foley bankrupted The Bibb. We did not just lose our jobs. We lost our town," one of them says in the video. Says another: "I don't think Tom Foley should make $20 million at the demise of somebody else losing their job." And another says: "I would not want him as governor."