News and Analysis

When upscale men's fashion retailer Hugo Boss decided to close its Brooklyn, Ohio plant, state officials begged controlling shareholder Permira to reconsider. Both the facility and Hugo Boss itself were profitable, they argued, and the community could hardly afford the loss of another 400 jobs. Permira, a European private equity firm, didn't seem to listen. And, to add insult to injury, Hugo Boss said it was still on track to pay out a special dividend. Erin last month suggested that Permira was playing with fire: Companies usually cite fiduciary duties in making layoffs and shutting facilities — they have an obligation to make money for their shareholders. In the case of a private equity firm, those shareholders often are pension funds, which could quite possibly include the pensions of the workers getting laid off (and subsequently, losing their pensions?). Well, one of Permira's investors is the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS), which has committed approximately 160 million to a pair of Permira funds (including the one that holds Hugo Boss). It doesn't appear that any OPERS members work at the Hugo Boss plant, but the system is still steamed with how the factory closure has been handled.
LONDON (Reuters) – A bold plan to combine Germany’s Ratiopharm and Iceland’s Actavis, two of the world’s biggest generic drugmakers, could cure a multi billion-euro debt headache for Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), Actavis’s main creditor. Actavis is vying with Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) and Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (TEVA.TA) in the 3 billion-euro auction of Ratiopharm, which […]
Now that private companies stay private longer, more and more of them have amassed large valuations. That, at least, is one takeaway from the index launched today by private stock-trading site SharesPost, which aims set approximate valuations for hot venture-backed companies. The SharesPost Venture-Backed Index, which crunches data from four sources to set values, currently covers seven companies, with valuations ranging from $227 million to $11.5 billion. They include Facebook (estimated value of $11.5 billion), Zynga ($2.6 billion), Twitter ($1.45 billion), LinkedIn ($1.3 billion), Tesla Motors ($1.28 billion), Linden Lab ($383 million), and Serious Materials ($227 million). SharesPost CEO Greg Brogger says the valuations are not intended as a hard-and-fast price point for setting sales prices. Rather, the idea is to give potential buyers and sellers of private company stock some easy-to-access data points to consider when setting up a transaction.
Roark Capital Group and Entrepreneur Partners have acquired Peachtree Business Products, an Atlanta-based provider of direct marketing supplies, according to a regulatory filing. No pricing terms were disclosed.
Monarch Natural Gas, a portfolio company of Metalmark Capital Partners, has completed previously announced deal for most of the Riverbend midstream assets of Gasco Energy (NYSE Amex: GSX). The transaction was valued at $23 million in cash, and included related salt water evaporative facilities.
Pierpont Securities LLC has launched as a government securities broker-dealer, with $200 million in capital commitments from General Atlantic and Stone Point Capital. Company management has committed an additional $20 million.
J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Water Asset Management have agreed to acquire SouthWest Water Co. (Nasdaq: SWWC). The take-private deal is valued at around $275 million, or $11 per share.
NEW YORK/FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany’s E.ON (EONGn.DE), the world’s largest utility by sales, may sell its U.S. unit in what could be one of the biggest deals in the industry this year, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. “It’d be good to get rid of that business,” said a person from within E.ON familiar […]
LONDON (Reuters) – Part-nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L) has set an early April deadline for potential buyers of its payment processing arm and more than 300 bank branches, people familiar with the matter said. RBS, 84 percent state-owned after it was bailed out by the UK taxpayer at the height of the credit crisis, […]
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC plans to buy as much as $230 million of common stock in Primerica Inc from Citigroup Inc (C.N) in connection with the bank’s planned initial public offering for its life insurance unit. The planned purchase was revealed in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission […]
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