Word: pergamon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...over vintage wines and aged whisky, reporters and editors swap the stories that tough British libel laws discourage them from printing. One of the most durable topics over the past few years has been the flamboyant personality and liberal accounting methods of Captain Robert Maxwell, 46, who built tiny Pergamon Press into a major scientific publishing house. Among financial editors there was a common conviction that the Czech-born publisher, who won a military cross while fighting with the British in World War II, was an expert in complex corporate maneuvers...
...defeated in the June election, was held in considerably greater esteem in London's financial community. Last year, advised by merchant bankers N.M. Rothschild & Sons, Saul Steinberg, 31, chairman of Manhattan's Leasco Data Processing Equipment Corp., made a $60 million bid for control of Pergamon. The ebullient Steinberg saw Pergamon's big library of scientific data as a logical complement to Leasco (1969 sales: $101 million), which has aggressively moved into all phases of computer information services as well as management consulting and insurance...
Tumultuous Meeting. Steinberg halted his takeover effort a year ago, but not before Leasco had spent some $22 million to buy 38% of Pergamon's stock in the open market. Last October a tumultuous stockholders' meeting voted Maxwell off the board and out of the chairmanship. Next month Leasco filed a suit charging Maxwell and his associates with conspiring to make false statements about Pergamon's earnings and financial condition. Leasco demands $22 million in damages; Maxwell insists that the suit is a "ploy," and is suing Leasco, alleging conspiracy to defraud...
...heart of the dispute are Pergamon's profits. Under the accounting formula used by Maxwell, Pergamon had 1968 pretax profits of $5.04 million. But a special audit by Price Waterhouse, published two weeks ago, placed 1968 profits at only $1.2 million and Pergamon's year-end assets at $10.8 million rather than the $16.9 million originally reported...