History's biggest leveraged buyout was actually a little bigger than customarily portrayed.

So says Energy Future Holdings Corp.'s executive vice president and chief financial officer Paul Keglevic, noting: "The number I always use is $48 billion." That's $3 billion more than the $45 billion price that EFH, then called TXU Corp., advertised when Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners agreed to acquire it in February 2007. That figure has been parroted ever since.

But Keglevic, who wasn't CFO at the time of the buyout, says the lower number fails to account for all the debt that remained on the books after the buyout.

The rollover debt totaled about $8.3 billion, he says.

It consists of $2.5 billion of holding company debt, $1.5 billion of pollution control bonds carried by EFH's Texas Competitive Electric Holdings Co. LLC subsidiary, $3.8 billion of old borrowings by Oncor Electric Delivery, EFH's transmission and distribution unit, and a further $500 million of long-term debt that was then payable.

"There was $31.5 billion of new debt," he says. "When you add that up and then add the $8.3 billion of equity" the private equity sponsors invested, "you get $48 billion."

In the two years since the LBO, EFH's debt has risen by $3 billion to about $43 billion, partly, Keglevic adds, because EFH has been paying the interest on several billion dollars of pay-in-kind toggle bonds by issuing more bonds instead of paying cash. -- D.C.