Unhitch the tractor, sunshine. (international corporate reorganization of Massey-Ferguson into Varity)

UNHITCH THE TRACTOR, SUNSHINE

At launchtime on Friday, May 9, the champagne corks popped at Massey-Ferguson’s Toronto headquarters, marking the completion of Project Sunshine. For the third time in five years, the chairman and chief executive, Victor Rice, whose career began as a mail boy at Ford in Dagenham, England, and his treasurer Neil Arnold, an Oxford-educated engineer, had pulled off the near impossible. Some 140 of the world’s largest banks and insurance companies, the governments of Canada, Ontario and Britain — the latter via the UK Export Credits Guarantee Department — had put their names to a highly complex recapitalization and reconstruction.