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.
Preference shares were swapped into common stock, other paper transformed into new equity, huge dividend arrears forgiven if not forgotten, and a host of new debt concessions put in place. Consolidated group debt fell overnight from a pro forma $764 million to $408 million. And almost miraculously, Massey's biggest headache, its North American combine harvester business, was hived off where it could do the least damage . . . off the balance sheet.
A deal which had taken two years and involved crisis meetings in Toronto, New York, London and Bermuda had been struck.