And non-cash impairment charges of $22.1 million were recorded for radio broadcasting licenses, primarily in the Philadelphia market. On April 21, 2023, Radio One Entertainment Holdings closed on the sale of a 100% of the MGM National Harbor interest. Company received approximately $136.8 million at the time of the settlement of the put interest, representing the put price. Other income net was $96.5 million for the first half, primarily as a result of the gain on that sale. The Company repurchased $25 million of its 2028 notes at average price of approximately 89.1% of par in the first quarter, resulting in a net gain on retirement of debt of approximately $2.4 million. Total gross debt balance is now $725 million, down from $825 million at the start of 2022.
Interest expense decreased to approximately $28 million for the fourth quarter, down 11.8% from last year due to the debt pay-downs. The provision for income taxes was approximately $22 million for the first half, and the Company paid cash income taxes in the amount of $1.3 million. Net income was approximately $67.4 million or $1.42 per share compared to $32.8 million or $0.64 per share for the first half of prior year. Capital expenditure was approximately $4.1 million in the first half. And the Company repurchased 274,901 shares of Class D common stock in the amount of $1.4 million. As of June 30, 2023, gross debt was $725 million, ending unrestricted cash was $230.7 million, resulting in net debt of approximately $494.3 million compared to $143.5 million of LTM reported adjusted EBITDA.
Pro forma for the MGM sale, LTM adjusted EBITDA was $139.1 million, giving a total net leverage ratio of 3.55 times at the end of the period. And with that, I’ll hand back to Alfred.
Alfred C. Liggins: Thank you, Peter. Operator, could you open up for questions?
Operator: Certainly. Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We’ll go to Brad Kern with Fort Breaker [ph]. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst: Hi. Thanks for the call and for taking my question. First one I had was, how do you think about the IRR on open market debt purchases versus other use of cash proceeds? Do you think that the sort of a 12%-ish IRR is a high enough return to justify cash deployments there? And when you think about your cost of capital, how do you think about the way that you would deploy that cash when you think about returns?
Peter D. Thompson: Yes. Historically, we have looked at just sort of what that yield to worst is, and that’s where you are seeing that 12%. But in today’s environment, the fact of the matter is, we are earning about 5% on our cash right now. So it’s a delta between that 5% and that 12%. So, it’s not quite the double-digit return, but a couple of things. First of all, finding places to put money to work at a 20% IRR is hard, right? Like, we’ve done two radio acquisitions in the last year. And we like to pencil out our cash investments in the 20s and we feel good about that. Particularly, the Huston one in particular was really strong. However, and we think that our casino investment would have been something in the 20s, albeit that would have been a long return to capital process.
We wouldn’t have been seeing cash coming through the door off the bat, like you do from a radio acquisition. So that’s kind of how we look at it. But irrespective of that, we want to get our debt down. I think that we are not — we’re probably looking at — we have historically done our open market purchases in like kind of blocks of $25 million authorizations and kind of weighted into it. I suspect that we’ll probably do — take a similar approach. But we are going to pick a quantum that we’d like to pay down and go after it, and continue to look for other opportunities to earn 20%-plus on our money. But I talked to a lot of people out there that our investors, professional investors finding those opportunities in today’s environment, it’s tough.
But we keep looking.
Unidentified Analyst: Yes. That makes sense. I appreciate that perspective. I mean, how committed, as you look around for those types of 20%-plus return or whatever opportunities, how committed are you to the media business to radio and TV versus other diversifying ventures? And clearly you’ve shown a case for gaming. Like what are you considering?
Alfred C. Liggins: Yes. I mean, look, we were in the radio business only, right? And then, we got into the syndicated business when we bought Reach Media. Then we created TV One and got into the cable television business, and we created Urban One — excuse me, the Interactive One, and we got into the digital business. And we’re a publisher for the most part, right? We’re not like the other radio companies where the bulk of our business is podcasting or streaming. And then, we got into the gaming business. And so, we generally like to look for businesses that are tangential to the assets that we have, meaning that the assets that we have, have the ability to make us be more successful or can help us enter those businesses or actually be successful in those businesses than we might otherwise be.
And it’s worked out, right? I mean, we got into the gaming business with MGM because we were a media company based in Washington, D.C. and they were building a resort casino here. So, that’s kind of the stuff that we look at. So, we’re open to looking at other businesses. But we like to have a competitive advantage and some skill set. I generally do not want to — I wouldn’t want to do anything where we’re just out of our depth of knowledge. To me, that’s high degree of execution risk, you’re gambling, et cetera. And so, that’s kind of how we look at it. But there could be some consumer based businesses. I mean, if there was a — I mean, if you had a online digital Urban apparel retailer opportunity, right? That’s something — and I’m just talking off the top of my head now.
