I watched something on youtube that said the same. Essentially they borrowed 80% of the value of the company to buy the company and then added that debt to Toys R Us.
It's called a Leveraged Buyout, it's also not a bad board-level decision, it's a tactic to make short term profit at the cost of the whole company.
The company who oversaw the buyout were Bain capital who are run by Mitt Romney.
I think that’s what OpCapita/“Baker Acquisitions” did with GAME. After the buyout, GAME had to pay back the debt run up in buying them, cutting other costs substantially in order to help do this more expediently. It also led agreements with most publishers to buy stock on consignment (meaning it remained the property of, say, Sony, until actually sold), on the proviso that GAME reinforced RRP. It doesn’t mean GAME would otherwise be more competitively priced, but, in effect, they couldn’t be. It was pretty grim. We once had to give a standing ovation to the vultures who acquired the business at conference for “saving” us.