[hedged]

this is a common tax trick that companies use. They set up a trust and sell the trust subordinated bonds. Then the trust sells preferred stock to investors, which essentially receive a passthrough of the bond interest paid by the company.

the reason to do this is that the company wants to issue preferred stock (in this case mandatorily convertible into common stock at a future date), but dividends that they pay are not tax deductible. Using this structure they can deduct the dividend expense for tax purposes.