Sears has 24 hours to be saved

REUTERS/Peter Morgan PM

Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert.

• The deadline to submit bids for Sears' business falls on 28 December.
• Chairman Edward Lampert and his hedge fund ESL Investments outlined a plan earlier this month to buy up the rest of Sears for up to $4.6 billion in cash and stock. However, sources told CNBC that as of Thursday afternoon Lampert had not submitted his bid or rounded up financing.
• These sources also told CNBC that ESL is currently the only party offering to buy Sears as a whole. Without this, Sears will likely to be split up by the liquidators.

The day of reckoning has come for Sears.

The century-old department store chain has just 24 hours to secure a bid for the company, without which it faces liquidation.

Chairman Edward Lampert and his hedge fund ESL Investments outlined a plan earlier this month to buy up the rest of Sears for up to $4.6 billion in cash and stock. However, sources told CNBC that as of Thursday afternoon Lampert had not submitted his bid or rounded up financing.

These sources also said that ESL is currently the only party offering to buy Sears as a whole, CNBC reported.

A spokesperson for ESL Investments did not immediately respond to Business Insider.

Lampert may well be biding his time, however; sources told CNBC that it's also possible he could secure financing to meet Friday's deadline.

Read more: Sears, once the largest retailer in the world, has filed for bankruptcy and is closing 142 stores. Here's how it got there.

Sears filed for bankruptcy in October. The company has been losing money and closing stores for years, and many employees blame its former CEO turned chairman, Lampert. In interviews with Business Insider's Hayley Peterson in 2016, executives accused Lampert of neglecting Sears' stores and leaving them to crumble in his bid to turn Sears into a tech company.

Between 2013 and this October, Sears' store count dropped from 1,980 to 687, according to the company's bankruptcy filing. The department store stayed afloat thanks to Lampert bailing it out with billions of dollars of loans through his hedge fund ESL Investments.