Will staff buy NEC?
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NSORTIUM of 130 National Freight Company senior managers nveiled an ambitious plan to buy the company from the Govent and sell shares to all 28,000 employees. ALAN MILLAR ts.
I by NFC deputy chairman chief executive Peter ipson, and advised by Bars Merchant Bank, the Drtium plans to raise be£5m and £6m in equity al by selling shares of £100 lore to employees, and to )w around E45m to £50m in interest loans.
the deal goes through, it I raise this year the £50m to which the Government is ght to want for NFC, but h it would be unlikely to er on the stock exchange re next year.
Thompson announced in Ion last week that a prosus will be issued later, along details of the financial packwhich is still being negod, and that he hopes the pany will come under the rol of its new shareholders ctober 1 this year.
stressed that, although he )cts around £4m worth of es will be bought by the ipany's 2,400 managerial staff, every effort will be made to encourage all grades of employee to invest in the company.
The consortium envisages that the minimum investment will be £100 per employee, with the possibility of wives, husbands, and children participating in the scheme, but in order to encourage low graded staff to invest, such save as you earn schemes as £5 or £10 per month instalments are proposed.
According to Mr Thompson, the deal represents "far and away the largest buy-out by employees of the company for which they work", but it is not a Bennite workers' co-operative.
"We're not in the Meriden cooperative game," he said, and stressed that he had assured Transport Secretary Norman Fowler that the company would be run on normal commercial lines.
He said the change of ownership would create a new environment in which staff and management could operate. "The power of commitment we will get from thousands of drivers, fitters, clerks, and typists each with a stake in their business will, I am sure, through time transform the relatively mundane profit performance of the company in the last few years."
And while he was reluctant to come out into the open and say that the company expects wage bargaining and staff consultation procedures to change as a result of the employees becoming shareholders, there can be little doubt that many NFC man
agers and employees hope this will happen.
Mr Thompson said the plan was developed from an initial idea of a top management buyout, and developed gradually to its proposed scale.
The exact condition of NFC's balance sheet is a closely guarded secret, but the Company did reveal last week that it is trading profitably at the moment, compared with the erstwhile National Freight Corporation's £0.9m loss in the last nine months of its existence to September 30, 1980.