Word: goldsmiths
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British investors have long resisted highly leveraged buyouts, looking at them as a woolly American phenomenon -- interesting at a distance but unacceptable at close range. Last week Sir James Goldsmith forced them to take another look by launching a surprise $21 billion hostile bid for B.A.T Industries (1988 revenues: $29 billion). Backed by investors Kerry Packer, the Australian industrialist, and Jacob Rothschild, the British financier, Goldsmith plans to break up the sprawling London-based conglomerate and "liberate" far-flung divisions that sell everything from cigarettes (Kool, Viceroy) to insurance in more than 40 countries...
...pull off the deal, Goldsmith and his partners propose to borrow nearly $17 billion. Drexel Burnham Lambert will raise $6.4 billion through a junk- bond issue, and Bankers Trust will assemble a consortium of banks to provide the rest. Yet B.A.T investors would get no cash for their 1.5 billion shares. Instead, Goldsmith and his partners, bidding through a company called Hoylake Investments, would pay B.A.T shareholders a combination of Hoylake stock and loan chits worth $13.82 a share (B.A.T stock was trading at 11.28 in London before the deal was announced). Hoylake would pay down the debts by selling...
B.A.T immediately slapped down last week's bid. Chairman Patrick Sheehy described the offer as "no more than an ill-conceived attempt at destructive financial engineering," designed to give the raiders a quick payout by stripping the company's assets. London investors questioned the feasibility of Goldsmith's financing, while corporate chieftains feared he might set off a rash of leveraged takeover raids...
...stories Trevor selects stretch from the distant past to the here and now, although the emphasis falls decidedly on 20th century works. Thus some brief tales translated from the original Gaelic lead to a succession of pieces by well-known names (Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde) and then to such acknowledged modern masterpieces as James Joyce's The Dead and Frank O'Connor's The Majesty of the Law. The familiar mixes easily with material less so: William Carleton's eerie The Death of a Devotee, Bernard Mac Laverty's grim Life Drawing. All this diversity is held together...
...starters, he slipped out of the market before the crash, protecting his fortune. But what really makes Goldsmith different is his love of luxury, coupled with a penchant for lecturing the world on everything from Communism to AIDS. "He' s sometimes downright reactionary," says a former associate. "But he is also ferociously anti- Establishment, right, left and center...