At&T; Capital Strikes Deal To Sell Company

AT&T Capital Corp., which has helped thousands of companies pay for communications equipment, will be sold to its top managers and an investor group for $2.2 billion, AT&T Corp. said Thursday.

The sale is indirectly related to AT&T’s breakup into three companies. It had been planned since the breakup was announced last September, although, as a practical matter, AT&T Capital has been running independently for years and has even had its own stock issue since July 1993.

The buyers include AT&T Capital managers as well as GRS Holding Co. Ltd., which owns a rail-leasing company in Britain, and Babcock & Brown, a San Francisco-based financing company.