To answer your question, the debt holders take precedence over the equity holders like Bain Capital, and generally being an equity holder and having your equity stake wiped to $0 is not a good outcome for a private equity firm. Bain does have to pay off debts - that is what the liquidation of assets is being done for - to pay off debts to the debt holders. Bain doesn't get to keep those assets.
This assumes they occur post bankruptcy. Looting a company involves dept then dividends from selling off assets to the point a company can't make debt payments. The money is already gone by the time the company can't pay, so they don't care what happens to the shell at that point.
Leveraged buyouts are basically ponzi schemes designed to use recurring revenue to pay back debtors, rather than the usual scheduled lump sum payout down the road.
They were tweaked to work on a different time scale.
The idea they can get some distance to avoid scrutiny.
In a lot of cases, the debtors are also the owners of the firm that initiated the leveraged buyout. They load the target up with debt, can't make the payments, and then they collect as debtors.
See Sears and their current CEO for exactly that model. It's been going on in retail for years. They're all getting boned hard though thanks to Amazon gutting brick-n-mortar retail. OOPS.
Of course the real people being screwed are the folks on main street.
Except, I think the rub here is that Bain will have paid itself enormous consulting fees from toys r us coffers.
My guess is that they come out ahead even after the bankruptcy. They would have put some of their own money in to purchase equity but my guess is, not more than fees would amount to after a decade.
