West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Some analysts are saying that the mighty New York Times might be headed down the same path as the bankrupt Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

Hedge fund shareholders, Harbinger Capital Partners Funds and Firebrand Partners own 19% of the NYT Company, and the outlook does not look good. NYT is approximately $1 billion in debt, the result of its move to a new building on Eighth Avenue a couple of years ago.

Harbinger Capital Partners has grown to one of the 15 largest hedge funds, by assets, in America. Firebrand Partners is an operational activist firm that invests in publicly-traded companies whose brand equity represents significant upside relative to their market capitalization.

The NYT Company includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and 15 other daily newspapers.

Alex Akesson

Tags: accredited-investors, boston globe, brand equity, chicago tribune, daily-newspapers, firebrand-partners, fund shareholders, harbinger, harbinger capital partners, hedgeco, international-herald-tribune, los angeles times, market capitalization, new york times, nyt, partners funds, tribune company

Zurich, September 2008 – Finter Bank Zurich and Bank Hugo Kahn AG, Zurich, hereby announce the merger of their two institutions.  Completion of the transaction is planned for the first quarter of 2009.

Bank Hugo Kahn has a tradition going back more than eighty years in the classical private-banking business and serves clients both in Switzerland and abroad. Bank Hugo Kahn’s successful business model is going to be integrated within the Finter Bank Zurich organisation, where it is to be developed further and enlarged under the same management as prior to the acquisition. Dr. Claude H. Kahn, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bank Hugo Kahn and, to date, holder of 90% of its shares comments on the transfer: “I am really delighted to see my life’s work passing into the hands of a bank which is also controlled by an entrepreneurial family. That is the guarantee that our business strategy, focused on individual client benefits and a high level of client satisfaction, will continue to be pursued and further perfected.”

Similar delight is shown by Dr. Marco Lanzi, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Finter Bank Zurich and Vincenzo Di Pierri, its CEO: “for us, the merger with Bank Hugo Kahn represents a crucial expansion step in our core business of classical private banking. We feel very confident that given the comparable corporate cultures clients will benefit from the continuation of highly professional service and a broader range of services offered to them.”

Bank Hugo Kahn was established in 1923, being named after its founder, and ownership was transferred in 1961 to Claude H. Kahn, who remained in charge of the operational management of the bank until 1994. The current CEO, Daniel H. Schlauri, has been working for Bank Hugo Kahn for approximately thirteen years. His view is that “we are very pleased that we are going to be able to continue to look after our client relations and to expand them under the umbrella of Finter Bank Zurich. We expect the merger of the two classical private banks to bring additional stimuli for growth, thanks to the wider spectrum of products and the opening up of new markets”.

Bank Hugo Kahn manages client assets worth approximately CHF 900 million. Finter Bank Zurich was founded in 1958. At its branches in Zurich, Lugano and Chiasso, as well as through its subsidiary bank in the Bahamas, it offers comprehensive services to wealthy private clients, with its main focus on investment advisory services and portfolio management. Its subsidiary FinterLife offers fund-linked life insurance products. The Finter Bank Group belongs to the Italmobiliare Group, which has operations around the world. The Pesenti family, which stands behind Italmobiliare, traces its success as an entrepreneurial dynasty, principally in the cement industry, back to the nineteenth century.

In this transaction, Swiss Capital Group acted as the exclusive financial consultant to the sellers.

Contacts:

Bank Hugo Kahn:
Dr. Hans-Rudolf Staiger
Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors
Tel. +41 44 283 86 86

Finter Bank Zurich:
Dr. Marco Lanzi
Chairman of the Board of Directors
Tel. +41 44 289 57 57

Tags: chief-executive, collateralized, epithet, kopp, labour-party, nyt, seamlessly

CFO.com – Even hedge funds are not immune to the credit crunch. A small hedge fund that provided short-term debt to companies has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Greenwich, Connecticut-based SageCrest Finance, managed by Windmill Management, said in its Chapter 11 petition filed in U.S. bankruptcy court that it had listed assets of $50 million to $100 million, and debt between $1 million and $10 million, reported Reuters. The fund had about $1 billion in assets under management as recently as a year ago, according to hedgefund.net.

In fact, the website points out that the credit crunch put the squeeze on SageCrest’s business strategy — which is providing asset-backed specialty financing to smaller private companies that have been closed out of traditional sources of capital. Many of its projects involved extending art-, real estate-, and structured settlement-based loans.

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Tags: adverse-effect, angela-merkel, asset-allocation-fund, assurances, cnet, devonshire, external-managers, farmland, fn, hsbc, investment-arm, nyt, sers, stalking-horse-bidder, wrong-way, zukin