MBF Healthcare Acquisition, a Coral Gables firm led by entrepreneur Mike Fernandez, announced the death of a $420 million deal to purchase a Pennsylvania company, Critical Homecare Solutions Holdings.

Executives said the deal -- which is something like an initial public offering of stock -- was killed off by the slumping stock market.

''Market conditions are just terrible,'' said Jorge Rico, chief operating officer of MBF Healthcare Acquisition. ``In essence, what we would have been doing was going out to raise equity and no one wants to do that right now.''

''It's just not the time to launch a road show,'' to get investors excited about the deal, Critical Homecare President Bob Cucuel said.

MBF, known as a blank-check company in the investment industry, announced in February it planned to buy Critical Homecare, a privately held company that provides home-infusion therapy and other infusion services.

Blank-check companies are devices in which investors put money with a veteran entrepreneur in the belief that he will come up with a deal that will make them all money. They were popular in the past several years when the stock market was bullish, but few have started in the past few weeks as the market and economy have been in a severe down slide.

Fernandez has a long record as a healthcare executive and in 2005 sold CarePlus Partners, a Medicare HMO, to Humana for $465 million.

Since then, he has operated a venture capital fund, MBF Healthcare Partners, which has raised at least $200 million to invest in various businesses, including Navarro Discount Pharmacies.

Blank-check companies essentially have a two-stage initial public offering -- the first when money is raised for the entrepreneur and then a second when he has selected a company and wants to close the deal, merging the firms into a new publicly traded entity.

MBF Healthcare Acquisition, a separate entity from MBF Healthcare Partners, was created in April 2007, with investors putting about $150 million into the company at a share price of $8. The resulting trust has until April 17, 2009, to complete a deal or give the money raised back to the investors.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 20, the company said that if the deal with Critical Homecare was not done, ``MBF will have insufficient time and resources to look for another suitable acquisition target and will most likely have to liquidate the trust in accordance with the terms of its . . . incorporation.''

However, on Monday, Rico said the company had not decided whether to look for a new deal or return the money. ``We're weighing all our options with our advisors.''

SEC filings indicate that the cash the company is holding in treasury bills is worth $8.20 a share. The stock on Monday closed at $7.75. Rico said there was no breakup fee for the deal.

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