FACTBOX: Five facts about CIT Group

NEW YORK (Reuters) - CIT Group Inc, a lender to a million small and mid-sized U.S. businesses, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday.

Here are a few facts about the company:

* CIT was founded in St Louis in 1908 by Henry Ittleson, a purchaser for a St. Louis department store who noticed that many wholesalers were chronically short of cash and unable to get loans.

* Tyco International agreed to buy CIT for about $10 billion in 2001 but was forced to spin it off to shareholders a year later as Tyco struggled with a massive debt burden from such acquisitions.

* The commercial lender has more than $60 billion of assets, and has hundreds of thousands of clients, including Dunkin' Donuts franchisees and film production company Dark Castle Entertainment.

* CIT, a Fortune 500 company, lost its membership in the Standard & Poor's 500 index in July. Its shares closed at 72 cents on Friday, after trading as high as $61.59 in 2007.

* The company had been based in Livingston, New Jersey, until Chief Executive Jeff Peek moved to a brand new, 28-story, glass-encased tower on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in New York in April 2006.

(Reporting by Steve Eder; Editing Bernard Orr)