Clarification: HMH and Moody’s

-- Publishers Weekly, 5/13/2009 8:19:00 AM

A spokesperson for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt notes that Moody’s is no longer rating the company’s debt because the publisher asked Moody’s to withdraw their rating. A story by the Irish Times, picked up by The Bookseller and run in yesterday’s Morning Report in PW Daily said the rating agency decided on its own to stop rating the debt. “Moody’s didn’t proactively withdraw its rating of HMH, we asked them to do so,” the spokesperson said. Earlier this year, Moody’s had downgraded some of HMH’s debt, a move that the company disagreed with. The company has more than $6 billion in debt, but did get creditors to relax terms on some of the loans.