Stockholders Equity

3 Months Ended

Dec. 31, 2011

Stockholders' Equity Attributable to Parent [Abstract]

6. Stockholders Equity

6. Stockholders' Equity

On December 7, 2011, the Company declared a special cash dividend on its Common Stock of $1.00 per share to holders of record on December 23, 2011. The dividend was paid on January 3, 2012.

Although the Board of Directors (the "Board") decided to pay cash dividends to common stockholders, this is not necessarily indicative of the ability of the Company to pay (or the future willingness of the Board to declare the advisability of) cash dividends to our common stockholders on a consistent basis or at all in the future.

On June 1, 2011, the Company redeemed all 6,100,000 shares of its issued and outstanding Series A Preferred at a redemption price of $25 per share plus accrued dividends through that date.  Pursuant to ASC 260, for earnings per share purposes, we recognized the deficit of the carrying amount of the Series A Preferred over the consideration paid to redeem the shares.

The Series A Preferred was recorded in our Additional Paid-In Capital account, net of original issue costs at $146.3 million prior to the redemption. The Company paid $152.5 million to redeem the shares on June 1, 2011 of which $7.7 million was paid to our insurance subsidiaries in exchange for their holdings. The difference between what was paid to redeem the shares less their carrying amount on our balance sheet, reduced by our insurance subsidiaries holdings is $5.9 million. This amount was recognized as a reduction to our earnings available to our common shareholders for the purposes of computing earnings per share for the first nine months of fiscal 2012.

From January 1, 2009 through March 31, 2011, our insurance subsidiaries purchased 308,300 shares of Series A Preferred on the open market for $7.2 million. Pursuant to ASC 260, we recognized a $0.2 million charge to net earnings for the first nine months of fiscal 2011 in connection with these entities.