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.
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