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...
