By: E&P Staff Reports on Wednesday in the New York Post and then on CNBC that former AIG chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg was serious about trying to take over The New York Times Co. sent the company's stock rising, despite serious doubts about that ever happening.
By the end of the day, a Greenberg spokesman said he had no such plans.
However, in a new twist, Business Week's Tom Lowry and Jon Fine
claim that Times' Chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. is "thinking about taking the company private. In recent months, he has been quietly soliciting advice from trusted friend and financial adviser Steven Rattner, according to sources familiar with those discussions....
"Last spring, BusinessWeek has learned, Rattner met with members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, who control the voting shares of the parent company through a trust and hold 9 of the company's 13 director seats. He offered various strategic alternatives, say sources, including a leveraged buyout, for the company, which has a market cap of $3.3 billion, less than half its peak in 2002. Rattner and Sulzberger, who work out together in the mornings, continue to talk informally about the possibility of the Times' going private, say these same people.
"Despite those talks, Sulzberger continues to defend, at least publicly, the current structure of the company, which has two classes of stock. The sources say Sulzberger never asked for a more formal private buyout plan from his old friend. Sulzberger declined to comment.
"A buyout would offer all the usual enticements: a premium that some investment bankers estimate could be as much as 20% for shareholders, plus the opportunity to retreat from market scrutiny. But make no mistake: Going private soon remains unlikely and would be no easy feat."
On the other hand, they note: "the Times faces increasingly withering scrutiny. Investors holding more than a quarter of its common shares withheld votes for directors at the annual meeting in April. At the same time, Morgan Stanley Investment Managemen, which owns 7.6% of the company's common shares, filed documents with the Securities & Exchange Commission requesting that the dual share structure, never popular with governance hawks, be put to a shareholder vote."
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