Finance

There’s at least one additional clue to what tipped the scales in the Quarto shareholder vote that removed Laurence Orbach from the board Wednesday: Harwood Capital, representing the leading dissident shareholders, indicated in a November 6 regulatory filing that they acquired over 2 million options on Quarto’s stock, expiring next month, that conveyed voting rights on an additional 10 percent of shares–giving their group 29 percent of the votes. Additionally, former partner Robert Morley–thought to be voting with Orbach and the board–switched positions and built up his own stake, helping to give the dissidents almost 55 percent of shareholder votes. New […]

McGraw-Hill’s exploration of a sale of their education publishing division is down to one final bidder, Apollo Global Management, which has been tipped as interested since the sale process began earlier this year. But press account continue to give an exaggerated depiction of the process. Apollo is the last bidder left and, as sources have indicated to us for some time, is bidding less than McGraw-Hill wanted, at something under $2.5 billion. Which only makes sense, since McGraw-Hill’s own SEC documents describing to shareholders what an indepedent Education company would look like listed $2.455 billion in assets, and an anticipated […]

Catching up from the storm, the Authors Guild posted a member alert on Monday saying that the proposed Penguin Random House merger “merits close scrutiny from antitrust officials at the Justice Department or the FTC.” As Sarah Weinman reported last week, the Authors Guild filed an objection with the FTC over Bertelsmann’s last big purchase, of Random House itself, in 1998, ultimately to no avail. The Guild says the merged companies’ “share of the U.S. trade book market for fiction and narrative non-fiction likely exceeds 35%. Their share in certain submarkets is no doubt even higher.” Authors Guild president Scott […]

Another piece of speculation from when the Penguin Random House merger was coming together has also been confirmed: Random House will purchase Mondadori’s fifty percent share in their Spanish and Latin American book publishing joint venture, Random House Mondadori. Random House is paying 54.5 million euros ($70.01 million), Reuters reports, and Mondadori is booking a capital gain of just 2.5 million euros on the transaction. Like the larger Penguin merger, the Mondadori buyout is subject to approval by Spanish antitrust authorities, and “is expected to close before year-end.” We were told by a company spokesperson the buyout was “long in […]

Continuing their investment in digital platforms and professional development, Wiley announced another acquisition Monday: they will purchase Efficient Learning Systems for $24 million. An e-learning system provider in areas like professional finance and accounting, the company has sales of approximately $7 million. SVP of professional development Mark Allin says in the press release, “This acquisition makes Wiley a leader in the growing CPA test preparation market and provides us with a scalable platform that can be leveraged across other areas of our professional segment.”