Word: kennecott
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...Kennecott and Curtiss-Wright finally end their feud
...years, American businessmen have watched the ploys and counterploys of one of the most fiercely contested corporate takeover struggles in history. The boardroom battle pitted a sometime Texas rancher against an aging, ambitious corporate raider who was embarked on probably his last big fight. At stake was control of Kennecott Corp., the nation's largest copper company (1979 sales: $2.5 billion...
Finally last week the feud was settled. Kennecott and Curtiss-Wright, the upstart industrial and aerospace conglomerate that tried to take over the copper company, signed a ten-year agreement preventing either one of them from trying to gain control of the other. Says Erica Steinberger, a lawyer advising Curtiss-Wright: "This is the grand finale, the climax, the end-I hope...
...saga began in late 1977, when Kennecott took some of the proceeds from the Government-ordered sale of a subsidiary, Peabody Coal Co., and bought Carborundum Co., a maker of abrasives. As soon as the purchase was made, T. Roland (Ted) Berner, 70, the chairman of Curtiss-Wright, saw an opportunity. He said that Kennecott paid too much for Carborundum and that the copper company should have spent the money for improvement of its antiquated copper mines or distributed it to the shareholders. Berner then spent $75.5 million to buy 9.9% of Kennecott's shares and announced that...
Such a proxy fight was nothing new to Berner. He used one to win a seat on the board of Curtiss-Wright almost 30 years ago. During the past decade he was also involved in three similar, though smaller, battles. But despite the challenge, Kennecott prevailed in Round 1, winning the proxy fight by a scant 1.1 million shares out of approximately 26 million voted at the annual meeting of company stockholders in 1978. Then, five months later, a federal court set aside that decision saying that shareholders might have been unduly influenced by the last-minute court battle that...