Word: lazard
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Earlier this month, Lazard Frères & Co., a Paris banking house associated with Lazard of Manhattan and of London, was excluded from any role in floating a $25 million bond issue for Air France. One of the participants, Intra Investment Co., which gets its money from Kuwait, Qatar and Lebanon, insisted that Lazard be shut out. Intra officials put pressure on the two lead banks in the deal, Credit Lyonnais and Banque Nationale de Paris, both of which are government owned. Lazard was also excluded from a $25 million issue for another client, the state-owned utility, Compagnie Nationale...
...Lazard's officers were so upset that they took a rare step in the genteel world of investment banking; they complained to the French Finance Ministry. It seemed most unsettling that the Arabs had forced French banks to exclude French businessmen from financings for French government companies. But Premier Jacques Chirac refused to get involved, declaring the exclusion to be "a matter of relations among banks and between banks and their clients...
Sign of Resistance. Elsewhere, however, there were growing signs of resistance to the Arab muscle. In Manhattan, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith refused to capitulate to demands by the Kuwait International Investment Co. to drop the U.S. branch of Lazard Frères as a participant in two lending syndicates that will raise $50 million for the Mexican government and $25 million for Volvo. Merrill Lynch Chairman Donald Regan was not about to exclude Lazard or slight its chairman, 76-year-old Andre Meyer. The Kuwaitis then dropped out of the deals. Echoing the typical sentiments among investment bankers, Paul...
Such financial legerdemain has become a specialty of Lazard and Rohatyn since the late 1960s, when Lazard Chairman Andre Meyer turned pessimistic about the future of conventional investment banking (basically, the underwriting of stock and bond issues) and decided to diversify. Lazard, the American arm of an international firm that also has offices in London and Paris, pushed into investments in oil wells, cattle herds and California vineyards, and organized a "mergers and reorganizations" group-a kind of financial salvage crew-under Rohatyn...
...section has had great success. In 1967 Lazard Partner Stanley De J. Osborne arranged the merger with McDonnell Aircraft that kept Douglas Aircraft from going under; later, Partner Howard S. Kniffin helped Boise Cascade spin off a number of enterprises in mobile homes and chemicals that were doing little for it but lose money. Meyer, still active at 75, last week headed off a threatened proxy fight at the Signal Cos. (shipping, Mack trucks, radio stations, the California Angels baseball team) by getting an Italian investment group to buy a major interest...