| BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - The Rocky Mountain Sugar Growers
Cooperative and Tate & Lyle North American Sugars announced Monday the
pending sale of operations in four states.
The cooperative is made up of five grower groups in Montana, Wyoming,
Colorado and Nebraska.
The tentative agreement involves the sale of six Western Sugar Co.
factories in Billings, Lovell, Wyo., Greeley and Fort Morgan, Colo., and
Scottsbluff and Bayard, Neb.
The nonbinding agreement calls for closing the sale over the next three
to six months, contingent upon financing and grower investment.
Rick Dorn of Hardin, president of the cooperative formed this summer,
said, "We are pleased that Tate & Lyle has provided the
opportunity to the growers to acquire Western Sugar. This will allow the
growers to better control the sugar beet industry in their areas and to
receive increased profits for approximately 1,110 family farms in the
growing areas."
Dorn said the price was one growers could work with.
"We are pleased with the numbers," he said. "They are at
the low end of this industry's price."
Neither side put a price tag on the grower buyout. Sugar industry
analysts said the book value of the Western properties is between $150
million and $160 million.
The Billings Gazette said it was told the price for Western Sugar's
assets was set at $78 million or about half of the book value.
Randon Wilson, a Salt Lake attorney who handled the transfer of the
Amalgamated Sugar Co. to the Snake River Cooperative in Idaho several
years ago, said the $78 million price was correct, the Gazette said.
Wilson is assisting the Western growers in their effort to buy the
company.
Western Sugar Co. has 185,000 acres of beets under contract in the four
states. It has 600 employees. It was formed in 1985 when Tate & Lyle,
based in London, bought the six plants from the bankrupt Great Western
Sugar Co., then owned by the Hunt brothers of Dallas, Texas. |