Health fears hit Lazard’s Wasserstein
BRUCE Wasserstein, the 61-year-old chairman and chief executive of Lazard who is leading the team advising Kraft on its £10.2bn bid for Cadbury, has been hospitalised with an irregular heartbeat.
Lazard yesterday said Wasserstein is in “a serious but stable condition and is recovering”.
Lazard shares yesterday dropped two per cent to $41.01 on the news that its hard-hitting boss was in hospital.
Lazard hired Wasserstein in 2001 in a bid to revitalise the advisory firm which was once heralded as the best adviser in the business.
Wasserstein is famous in Wall Street for advising on some of the biggest debt-funded takeovers in the merger boom of the late 1980s including Philip Morris’s $13bn bid for Kraft, and KKR’s $31bn offer RJR Nabisco, which was recorded for posterity in the book Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burroughs and John Helyar.
Fears were immediately raised about how Wasserstein’s condition might hit Kraft’s bid for Cadbury. Kraft has until 9 November to table a formal offer or walk away.
Kraft has enlisted a hard-hitting roster of advisers, which include Citigroup and Deutsche Bank’s heavyweights, Ernst & Young and Clifford Chance.
Evolution Securities analyst Warren Ackerman said the rest of Kraft’s advisers would be watching Cadbury’s update to see how much they need to sweeten the offer for Cadbury.
He added: “This won’t stop Kraft. I think they’ll still go in guns blazing.”
FAST FACTS KRAFT’S CADBURY OFFER
&9679; Kraft announced a proposed offer for Cadbury last month, which valued the company at £10.2bn and its shares at 745p.
&9679; Cadbury immediately dismissed it, but analysts believe it is just a matter of pricing.
BRUCE WASSERSTEIN
LAZARD
CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
Bruce Wasserstein, 61 has been a heavyweight on Wall Street since the 1980s.
Brooklyn-born Wasserstein graduated from the University of Michigan before enrolling at Harvard Law School at 18.
After graduating with an MBA he attended the London School of Economics and went to Cambridge University as a Knox Travelling Fellow.
Wasserstein joined elite law firm Cravath, Swaine & Morre, but soon traded life at the law firm for the faster pace of Wall Street.
He then joined investment bank First Boston, where he and Joseph Perella, another star Wall Street banker, built an M&A practice before creating Wasserstein Perella & Co in 1988. He later sold his firm to Germany’s Dresdner Bank in 2001 for $1.5bn.
He has served as a director of Lazard since 2002, and after taking the company public in May 2005 he was named the firm’s chief executive.
Wasserstein has helped broker more than 1,000 transactions worth more than $250bn, including Time’s merger with Warner Brothers.
Over the years, he has earned a reputation as a brilliant but hard-nosed banker who always found a way to get deals done.
Among other schemes, Wasserstein invented the “Pac-Man defence” where a takeover target turns and buys its would-be acquirer.