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• Ron Perelman Doesn’t Think Jews Like Mexican Food That Much

  New York Magazine - Found May. 26, 2009 Ron Perelman, the billionaire co-owner of Monkey Bar, chats Beth Landman up about his latest dip into the restaurant waters ? he?s reopening the

• Desirée Rogers Sucked Into Monkey Bar; Shakira Hits Michaels Yet ...

  New York Magazine - Found Jun. 29, 2009 Later on, Vicky Ward stopped by; Princess Firyal of Jordan, Ron Perelman, and Clive Davis were also there.

• Desirée Rogers Sucked Into Monkey Bar; Shakira Hits ...

  New York Magazine - Found Jun. 29, 2009 Later on, Vicky Ward stopped by; Princess Firyal of Jordan, Ron Perelman, and Clive Davis were also there.

• WINTOUR PUSHES ENVOY AGENDA

  New York Post - Found Jun. 25, 2009 Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward stopped by the table to say hello as Princess Firyal of Jordan, Ron Perelman and Clive Davis looked on. Ice queen makes Streep movie look like Care Bears - Sydney Morning Herald Fashion's ice queen: makes Streep movie look like Care Bears - Sydney Morning Herald 'The September Issue' Trailer: Behind The Scenes With The Almighty ... - Huffington Post The devil behind her Prada - Brisbane Times Explore All

  New York Post

• What Celebs Did in the Hamptons This Weekend

  New York Magazine - Found Jun. 23, 2009 ... slurped a 'Dirty Bird' margarita at the Blue Parrot, the quirky cantina revamped by Ron Perelman, Renée Zellweger, and Jon Bon Jovi.

• What to Eat at Blue Parrot

  New York Magazine - Found Jun. 23, 2009 Though Ron Perelman?s Blue Parrot has been soft-open for two weeks, it wasn?t until summer officially started last weekend that the marquee

• What to Eat at the Blue Parrot in East Hampton

  New York Magazine - Found Jun. 22, 2009 Though Ron Perelman?s Blue Parrot has been soft-open for two weeks, it wasn?t until summer officially started last weekend that the marquee

• Socialites Purr at Wildlife Conservation Gala

  New York Observer - Found Jun. 16, 2009 Warren Buffett, a porcupine. David Geffen, an iguana. Ron Perelman, a porpoise. Steven Rattner, T. Boone Pickens, crows. Carl Icahn, giraffe.

• What to Eat at the Blue Parrot in East Hampton

  WNBC.com - Found Jun. 23, 2009 0 Comments Post a Comment Print Email Share Share Del.icio.us MySpace Digg Facebook Though Ron Perelman?s Blue Parrot has been soft-open for two

• The Hamptons in Flip-Flops

  New York Times - Found May. 17, 2009 His investors, by the way, include Renée Zellweger, Ron Perelman, Larry Gagosian and Jon Bon Jovi, but their names were offered by a former...

Ron Perelman extracted from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License

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Ronald Perelman
Perelman at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival
Born	January 1, 1943 (1943-01-01) (age 66) Greensboro, North Carolina
Occupation	Businessman, investor
Net worth	$10 billion USD (2009)1
Children	6
Website MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc.

Ronald Owen Perelman (born January 1, 1943) is an American billionaire investor who made his fortune buying beleaguered corporations and re-selling them later for enormous profits. Once the richest man in America,² he is now the 18th richest American, and 35th richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of USD$10 billion.¹ He has invested in grocery, cigar, licorice, makeup, car, photography, television, camping, security, lottery, jewelry, banks, and comic book companies.

Contents 1 Business 1.1 Belmont Industries 1.2 On his own 1.3 Revlon 1.4 Savings and loans 1.5 Marvel 1.6 New World Communications 1.7 Coleman and Sunbeam 1.8 Morgan Stanley 1.9 SPAC 1.10 Other 2 Life 2.1 Cigars 2.2 Marriage 2.2.1 Faith Golding 2.2.2 Claudia Cohen 2.2.3 Patricia Duff 2.2.4 Ellen Barkin 2.3 Philanthropy 2.4 Religion 3 Controversy 3.1 Greenmail 3.2 Monica Lewinsky 3.3 Panavision 3.4 Fred Tepperman 4 Notes and references

Business

Belmont Industries

Perelman consummated his first major business deal in 1961 during his Freshman year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. After he was put on the scent of the Esslinger Brewery by his father, Ronald turned his attention to the details and found it an excellent deal. He and his father bought it for $800,000, then sold it three years later for a $1 million profit.³

Throughout Perelman's tenure at the Belmont Iron Works (later renamed Belmont Industries) he assisted his father, Raymond, on many other deals, earning millions of dollars in the process. Their general strategy was one Perelman would follow for the rest of his life: Purchase a company, sell off superfluous divisions to reduce debt and generate profit, bring the company back to its core business, and either sell it or hang onto it for cash flow. In 1978, twelve years after Perelman formally joined Belmont Industries, he was the vice president but he still strove for more power and influence in the company. Raymond told him that he had no intention of stepping down anytime soon. Perelman resigned and moved to New York. The two barely spoke to one another for the next six years.⁴

On his own

He orchestrated the purchase of Cohen-Hatfield Jewelers in 1978, his first deal as an independent investor free of his father's influence. He recognized the enormous value of Hatfield's mismanaged jewelry cache and bought control of the company with a $1.9 million loan from his wife, Faith Golding. Within a year, Perelman had sold all of company's retail locations and reduced the company to its lucrative wholesale jewelry division, earning him $15 million.⁵

His next target was MacAndrews & Forbes, a distributor of licorice extract and chocolate. The management and investors repeatedly rebuffed his efforts to purchase the company and filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to prevent the acquisition, but Perelman prevailed. That his father had tried and failed to acquire it 10 years earlier made his success particularly sweet.⁶

Revlon

In 1985, Perelman took on his biggest deal yet: The Revlon Corporation. Financed with over $700 million in junk bonds from Michael Milken's firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, Perelman offered to buy any or all of Revlon's 38.2 million outstanding shares for $47.5 a share when its street price stood at $45 a share. Initially rejected, he repeatedly raised his offer until it reached $53 a share while fighting Revlon's management every step of the way. Forstmann Little & Company swooped in at $56 a share, a brief public bidding war ensued, and Perelman triumphed with an offer of $58 a share. Perelman paid $1.8 billion to Revlon's shareholders, but he also paid $900 million of other costs associated with the purchase.⁷ Unfortunately for Perelman, Revlon has become nothing but trouble. Despite Perelman's regular cleansing of upper management⁸ and injecting millions of dollars into the company,⁹ Revlon stubbornly resists turning a profit. As of the first quarter of 2007, it has had one profitable quarter in the past 32.¹⁰ Its lack of profitability shows in its stock price which has plummeted to 1.20 a share by 2008, at which time it underwent a 1:10 reverse split; it trades under 50¢, adjusted for the split, as of 2009.¹¹ A major cause of Revlon's financial problems is the huge debt load stemming from Perelman's purchase of the company.¹²

Savings and loans

Perelman first entered what became known as the Savings & Loan crisis in 1988 when along with Gerald J. Ford he bought five insolvent thrifts with $12.2 billion in assets and $5.1 billion in federal aid for $315 million.¹³ The five banks originally operated as a single entity named First Texas Bank, but the name changed to First Gibraltar after about a week.¹⁴ Perelman's turn-around manifested as trimming the payroll, selling branches, and dumping of $2.5 billion of underperforming assets. In 1990, Perelman added San Antonio Savings Association and Sooner Federal to First Gibraltar for $10.1 million and $5.1 million, respectively. The purchase of San Antonio added $1.1 billion of healthy assets, $1.2 billion unhealthy assets, and a $1.3 billion government cash advance to Perelman's larder while Sooner only provided $1.2 billion in assets along with the typical government guarantees.¹⁵¹⁶ Sooner Federal was not only the last S&L Perelman bought, but the first he sold; In August 1992, he sold the pieces of Sooner to Bank of Oklahoma and Fourth Financial Corporation for $31.4 million.¹⁵ The following month he sold the rest of First Gibraltar to BankAmerica for $110 million, retaining four branches in Plano, Texas and $1.2 billion of assets in the mortgage and property management sectors.¹⁷ He renamed the four branches First Madison.¹⁸ It's unclear how much money Perelman made from his savings & loan deals, but it's estimated that he made anywhere from $600 million to $1.2 billion with most of the profits manifesting as tax breaks elsewhere in his empire.¹⁹ In essence, by owning First Gibraltar he was able to avoid paying hundreds of millions in federal taxes.²⁰

Perelman jumped back into the savings & loan game in a big way in 1994 by buying First Nationwide from the Ford Motor Company for $664 million.²¹ Ford held onto $1.8 billion of First Nationwide's assets valued at $444 million, two-thirds of which were considered troubled assets,²¹ offered to buy back up to $500 million of First Nationwide's other $7.9 billion of assets that went bad in the future, and gave Perelman $50 million to cover potential severance payments.¹⁹ Perelman quickly boosted its portfolio, adding $10 billion worth of mortgages in exchange for a $175 million payment to Resolution Trust Corporation.²² Before 1995 ended, Perelman added two more thrifts to his collective: SFFed's $4.1 billion of assets for $250 million²³ and Home Federal Financial's $735 million of assets and $662 million of deposits for $70.6 million.²⁴ Just as quickly as he added assets, branches, and deposits in California, he dumped what he had elsewhere in the country. In 1995 alone he sold off 79 branches with $4.3 billion in deposits spread out across five states.²⁵ 1996 went a little slower, but not eventfully. He acquired California Federal Bancorp for $1.2 billion, creating the 4th largest thrift in the country with $32.3 billion in assets.²⁶ In 1997, another $3.3 billion in mortgages were added courtesy of WMC Mortgage but it was an otherwise quiet year for First Nationwide.²⁷ In 1998, Perelman negotiated a stock swap with Golden State Bancorp to create the third largest thrift in the country with $50 billion of assets. The deal left Golden State's shareholders the majority, but Perelman's camp still controlled the company.²⁸ Everything remained quiet until May 2002 when Citigroup announced plans to buy Golden State for $5.8 billion, but ultimately reduced the offer to $4.9 billion due to a stock drop.²⁹ Citigroup's final offer was 0.821 shares of Citigroup common stock and $7.47 cash for every share of Golden State exchanged, which converted Perelman's 43 million shares of Golden State into $321,210,000 in cash plus 36,124,000 shares of Citigroup. All things considered, Perelman expected to make about $2 billion off the deal, but because he had quasi-sold many of his shares in the past, he probably gained substantially less than that.³⁰

Marvel

While the S&L crisis commanded national attention in 1989, Perelman made a move that left many analysts scratching their heads.³¹ He bought the Marvel Entertainment Group, the parent company of Marvel Comics, from New World Entertainment for $82.5 million. "It is a mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property," said Perelman. "Disney's got much more highly recognized characters and softer characters, whereas our characters are termed action heroes. But at Marvel we are now in the business of the creation and marketing of characters."³² Boosted by a massive merchandising effort, an increase in Marvel comic prices, and an overall boom in the comic book industry, Marvel's profits spiked. Perelman later added the baseball card companies Fleer Corporation and SkyBox International, Italian sticker manufacturer Panini Group, and comic book publishers Welsh Publishing and Malibu Comics to Marvel's holdings for a combined total of $700 million.³³ Investors around the world recognized his efforts and generated $80 million for Perelman when he issued Marvel's initial public offering. He later added a significant stake in Toy Biz to Marvel's holdings. His luck was not to last. Marvel's attempt to distribute its products directly led to a decrease in sales and aggravated the losses which Marvel suffered when the comic book bubble³⁴ popped, the 1994 Major League Baseball strike massacred the profits of the Fleer division,³⁵ and Panini was hobbled by poor showings at the box office by Disney (licensing Disney characters provided a major source of revenue for Panini, so when the movies performed poorly Panini performed poorly).³⁶ A major bondholder, Carl Icahn, fought to take control of the company from Perelman. Both men failed as Toy Biz owners Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad bought Marvel from Perelman and Icahn in order to protect their own financial interests.³⁶ Estimates of his profit on the deal vary widely. Chuck Rozanski estimates that Perelman made $200-400 million off Marvel;³³ Forbes thinks he made nothing;³⁷ and the judge in the Marvel bankruptcy trial estimated he made $280 million plus various tax advantages.³⁶

The story of Perelman's Marvel adventures were caricatured in Titans of Finance (Alternative Comics, 2001, ISBN 1891867059)³⁸ by R. Walker and Josh Neufeld, ³⁹ a comic book collaboration between a cartoonist and a finance columnist, which casts Wall Street executives and traders as heroes and villains. The lead story features Perelman, with Mike Vranos, Al Dunlap, and Victor Niederhoffer among those included.

New World Communications

In 1989, Perelman went back and bought New World Entertainment, the former parent company of Marvel, and then Four Star International. In 1993, Perelman acquired three major entities: SCI Television for $120 million plus $730 million in assumed debt, with seven television stations included in the deal; Genesis Entertainment, and Guthy-Renker. In late 1993, he reorgnanized all of the above-mentioned companies into a single corporation called New World Communications. In 1994, Perelman bought four more stations from the Great American Communications Company for $360 million and four more from Argyle Television Holdings for $716 million. His purchases set the stage for the Fox affiliate switches of 1994 in which Ronald Perelman rewrote the rules for how television affiliates operated and helped establish Fox as a force to be reckoned with.⁴⁰ Naturally, Ronald took home a tidy profit: In two deals in 1994 and 1996, Rupert Murdoch bought complete control of New World Communications for $3 billion.⁴¹⁴²

Coleman and Sunbeam

In between his purchase of Marvel and New World Communications, Perelman bought the Coleman Company for $545 million. Perelman handled the deal in his characteristic style: Buy the company, sell everything but the core business—In the case of Coleman, the camping and boating divisions—and enjoy the profits. Over the next several years, he bought nine more divisions for Coleman.⁴³ In December 1997, Perelman and Al Dunlap met in order to discuss a possible deal between Coleman and Sunbeam Products. Coleman's famous but narrow brand held less growth potential than originally thought and Ronald Perelman wanted out. Coincidentally, Al Dunlap was sitting on a financially insolvent company he wanted to dump.⁴⁴ It took until March 2 for them to finally come to an agreement: With some convincing from his banker Morgan Stanley, Perelman sold his entire stake (82%) in Coleman to Al Dunlap in exchange for $1.5 billion in cash and $680 million of Sunbeam stock.⁴⁵ They completed the deal on March 30, despite a sell-off triggering press release from March 19 that said Sunbeam would not meet sales expectations. On April 3, another press release took Sunbeam's stock from bad to worse: It would not only fall short of sales expectations for that quarter, but it would barely meet the sales expectations of two years ago. The stock went into a tail spin, falling from $54 a share to $24 a share in a matter of weeks and continued its downward spiral in the following weeks. Perelman bought control of Sunbeam in an effort to salvage the situation but it was for naught. The company had to file for bankruptcy within three years.⁴⁶

Morgan Stanley

On February 17, 2005, Perelman filed a lawsuit against Morgan Stanley.⁴⁷ Two facts were at issue: Did Morgan Stanley know about the problems with Sunbeam and was Ronald Perelman misled? During the discovery phase, the judge became exasperated with what she perceived as deliberate stonewalling on the part of Morgan Stanley and ordered the jury to assume Morgan Stanley deliberately and knowingly defrauded Perelman.⁴⁸ Hobbled, Morgan Stanley had no choice but to argue that Perelman was too savvy an investor to have fallen for their transparent tricks.⁴⁹ After a five-week trial, the jury deliberated for two days, found in favor of Perelman, and awarded him $1.45 billion.⁵⁰ The damages particularly stunned Morgan Stanley considering they passed up Perelman's offer to settle the case for $20 million.⁵¹ Morgan Stanley maintained that the court case was improperly decided, citing the judge's decision to use Florida law over New York law and her decision to order the jury to consider Morgan Stanley guilty before the trial began.⁵² In 2007, the courts of appeal reversed the judgement. The judges' declared Perelman hadn't provided any evidence showing he'd suffered any actual damage as a result of Morgan Stanley's actions. Perelman appealed,⁵³ but found himself shot down by the Florida Supreme Court who dismissed it in a 5-0 decision. ⁵⁴ Undeterred even after that setback, Perelman went back to the trial court and asked for the case to be reopened because the hiding of email evidence was "a classic example of fraud on the court". The trial court rejected his arguments, but as of January 2009, he is beseeching Florida's 4th Circuit to reopen the case. ⁵⁵

SPAC

In 2007, Perelman filed the paperwork for an SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) called MAFS Acquisition through his holding company MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings. A SPAC is a company founded solely for the purpose of buying out another company, but without any preselected target company. In Perelman's case, the company was selling 50 million units for $10 each. The IPO was being underwritten by Citigroup,⁵⁶ but on December 12 2008, a year after filing for an IPO, MAFS opted to withdraw their application for the "protection of investors". ⁵⁷

Other

Perelman's portfolio currently includes or has included Allied Barton,⁵⁸ Am General,⁵⁸ Clarke American,⁵⁸ Deluxe Laboratories,⁵⁸ Meridian Sports,⁵⁹ National Health Laboratories,⁶⁰ Pantry Pride,⁶¹ Scientific Games,⁵⁸ Siga Technologies,⁵⁸ Technicolor,⁶² and TransTech Pharma.⁵⁸

Life

Ronald Perelman was born in Greensboro, North Carolina to Raymond and Ruth Perelman in 1943.⁶³ His family practiced Judaism.⁶⁴ Raymond was an accomplished businessman in his own right. Along with his father and brother, he controlled the American Paper Products corporation. Raymond eventually left the company and bought Belmont Iron Works, a manufacturer of structural steel.⁶⁵

On Raymond's knee, Perelman learned the fundamentals of business.⁶⁶ By the time Ronald turned eleven years old he regularly sat in on board meetings of his father's company. Raymond was a rough teacher, harshly criticizing Ronald for even the slightest misstep.⁶³

Perelman attended The Haverford School and then the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where he followed in his father's foot steps and majored in business. He graduated in 1964 and completed his master's in 1966.⁶⁷

Cigars

The phrase 'cigar-chomping' tends to appear anywhere the name Ronald Perelman is written and with good reason.⁶⁸⁶⁹⁷⁰ Perelman first lit up when he was 26 years old. Trapped in a meeting that refused to end, he noticed a lawyer named Laddie Montague light up a cigar and start happily puffing away. Perelman asked if he could try one.⁷¹ From that day until he quit in 1999,⁷² he smoked between one and five cigars a day.⁷³ Perelman had Consolidated Cigar manufacture a custom 38-ring H. Upmann-style cigar just for him.⁷¹⁷⁴ The media speculated extensively about the exact reason he quit; New York magazine claimed his new wife, Ellen Barkin, made him quit,⁷⁵ and Forbes suggested he quit because he sold Consolidated Cigar.⁷² Perelman set the record straight in an interview with Institutional Investor: he quit at the encouragement of his youngest daughters, Samantha and Caleigh, whom he lived with.⁹

Marriage

Perelman has been married four times. He married Sterling Bank heiress Faith Golding in 1965 and they divorced in 1984. His marriage to gossip columnist Claudia Cohen lasted from 1985 to 1994. He wed socialite Patricia Duff in 1994 and divorced in 1996. Most recently, he was married to actress Ellen Barkin from 2000 to 2006.

Faith Golding

Perelman met his first wife, Faith Golding, in 1965 while on a cruise to Israel. As the heir to a fortune made in real estate and banking, Faith Golding controlled a personal fortune of around $100 million at the time of their marriage.⁷⁶ They adopted three children named Steven, Josh, and Hope, and Faith gave birth to a fourth child named Debra. Their marriage lasted until 1984 when Faith discovered Perelman was having an affair with a local florist after a bill for a Bulgari bracelet was sent to their home instead of Perelman's office. Faith threatened to scuttle Perelman's attempt to take MacAndrews & Forbes private in 1983 by staking a claim to a third of it due to a bank loan in her name. She further declared that Perelman defrauded the owners of the First Sterling Corporation (i.e. her) by buying thousands of dollars of gifts for the florist with the company's money, and made a very public spectacle of the divorce. Ronald Perelman responded by hiring Roy Cohn and flatly denying all of the allegations. The pair quickly settled the divorce with an estimated payout to Faith in excess of $8 million.⁷⁷

Claudia Cohen

Perelman met his second wife, Claudia Cohen, in 1984 at Le Cirque. Since Claudia Cohen worked in the gossip industry and Perelman was immensely wealthy, tales of their whirlwind courtship of less than a year appeared regularly in the gossip columns.⁷⁸ They married in a private, Orthodox wedding. A daughter, Samantha, soon followed. Perelman bestowed love and jewelry upon his new-found love, blowing her kisses in the hallways of his office and home, receiving calls of "Ron! Oh, Ron!" in return.⁷⁹ In August 1993, Ron filed for divorce.⁸⁰ Claudia left the marriage with well over $80 million.⁸⁰ In 2007, Claudia died after a secret seven-year battle with ovarian cancer. Perelman revealed during his speech at her funeral that he'd known about her cancer from the beginning and privately commissioned a vaccine as a part of his efforts to cure her.⁸¹ In March 2008, Perelman decided to change the name of Logan Hall, located at the University of Pennsylvania, to Cohen Hall, after his late ex-wife.⁸² He donated $20 million to the University to remodel what is now Perelman Quadrangle and as part of his donation, he had the option to change the name of Logan Hall. His decision to rename Logan Hall came to great shock to Penn faculty, alumni, and students. ⁸³

Patricia Duff

Patricia Duff was Perelman's third wife and messiest divorce. The pair first met in a Paris hotel lobby when both were still married: Perelman to Cohen, and Duff to Mike Medavoy.⁸⁴ After Duff divorced Medavoy, she soon married Perelman on January 25, 1995. She gave birth to his fourth daughter, Caleigh Sophia, before the wedding took place.⁸⁵ When the marriage between Duff and Perelman disintegrated in 1996, custody over Caleigh became a major issue. Both Perelman and Duff wanted full custody and their prenuptial agreement did not address the subject of child support. Initially private, the divorce proceedings were opened to the public at the request of Duff.⁸⁶ Neither party emerged with their reputations unscathed. The court psychiatrist found Duff to be paranoid and narcissistic and Perelman to have serious anger management issues,⁸⁷ Perelman caught a great deal of flak for testifying that it cost about $3 a day to feed his daughter,⁸⁸ and both sides alleged physical abuse by the other party.⁸⁹ The judge's sealed decision means the public will never know the exact results of the case,⁸⁶ but it's known that neither party actually won. Perelman is Caleigh's legal guardian, but Patricia has extensive visitation rights.⁹⁰

Ellen Barkin

Perelman met his fourth wife, actress Ellen Barkin, at a Vanity Fair Oscar after-party in 1999.⁹¹ After slightly more than a year of courtship, the two married in June 2000. All accounts indicate their five-year marriage was a stormy one. Much of the friction arose due to Ellen's acting career and her attendant travel schedule, but their mutually explosive tempers didn't help either. Perelman filed and obtained a divorce in early 2006. The press soundly mocked Perelman for his actions, the speed and timing of which suggested his real motivation was to avoid a clause in his prenuptial that would raise the amount in alimony he owed Ellen if he waited a few days longer. Depending on the source used, Ellen's yearly alimony ranges from $2 million to $3 million and the total payout ranged from $20 million to $65 million.⁹² In late 2007, the pair exchanged lawsuits. Part of the divorce settlement required Perelman to invest several million dollars in a film production company Ellen and her brother George (an aspiring screenwriter) had started. Perelman made only one of the payments, claiming that there was no evidence the two were actually producing films. Ellen sued for her money while Perelman counter-sued, alleging Ellen and her brother had looted the film company for themselves. ⁹³

Philanthropy

Perelman gives extensively to charity. In 2008, the Chronicle of Philanthropy listed Perelman as the 26th largest donor in the USA. Mr. Perelman donated $63.5 million in 2008 tp causes including, but not limited to: Weill Medical College of Cornell University Other key beneficiaries: Stand Up to Cancer, World Trade Center Memorial Fund and Ford's Theatre. Mr. Perelman pledged $25-million to Weill Medical College, in New York, to support research, education, and patient care at the Ronald O. Perelman and Claudia Cohen Center for Reproductive Medicine. In addition, Mr. Perelman pledged $15-million to Stand Up to Cancer, a Pasadena, Calif., organization that supports cancer research and efforts to advance treatment for cancer patients; $5-million to the World Trade Center Memorial Fund, in New York; and $2.5-million to Ford's Theatre, in Washington. Mr. Perelman declined to provide details about payments on those pledges. He also gave a total of $16-million to 581 nonprofit organizations, including Big Brothers Big Sisters, in Philadelphia; the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, in New York; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in Baltimore; the Rainforest Foundation U.S., in New York; and other arts, education, Jewish, medical research, and women's-health groups.

In 2006 alone, he donated over $60 million to various charitable groups and causes including Carnegie Hall and the World Trade Center Memorial.⁹⁴ Other notable donations include $20 million to the University of Pennsylvania for naming rights to the quadrangle,⁹⁵ $10 million to New York University to create the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology,⁹⁶ $4.7 million to Princeton University to create the Ronald Perelman Institute for Jewish Studies,⁹⁷ and $20 million to the Guggenheim Museum.⁹⁸

Religion

Religion has had a strong influence on Perelman's life. He grew up in a Conservative household,⁹⁹ and had a religious reawakening at the age of eighteen while on a family trip to Israel.⁹⁰ "I felt not just this enormous pride at being a Jew; I felt this enormous void at not being a better Jew. So I decided then to begin being a better Jew. As soon as I got married, we kept a kosher house, we became much more observant. We moved to New York shortly thereafter and joined an Orthodox synagogue and the kids grew up with much more Judaism surrounding them than I ever did".⁹⁰ Today, he strictly observes the Jewish Sabbath, spends three hours every Saturday in prayer,¹⁰⁰ keeps a kosher home,¹⁰¹ and donates millions to Jewish groups and causes, particularly the Chabad-Lubavitch sect.¹⁰⁰ He does not consider himself to be a member of Lubavitch. He supports them because he thinks they are Judaism's best chance for surviving and thriving in modern society.⁹⁰

Controversy

Greenmail

In the late 1980s, Perelman was repeatedly accused of engaging in greenmail.⁹ "Greenmail" is when someone buys a large block of a company's stock and threatens to take over the company unless he is paid a substantial premium over his purchase price. In the case of someone such as Perelman or Carl Icahn with a reputation as a corporate raider, the mere act of buying up shares could send a company into a panic and investors into a buying frenzy.¹⁰² Perelman insists he seriously intended to buy every corporation he bought into.⁸

He was first accused of greenmail in late 1986 during a run at CPC International when he bought 8.2% of CPC at around $75 a share and indirectly sold it back to CPC through Salomon Brothers a month later at 88.5 a share for a $40 million profit. Both CPC and Perelman denied it was greenmail despite appearances to the contrary, including what looked like an artificial price increase by Salomon shortly before they sold Perelman's shares.¹⁰³

Transworld, a company Perelman already held 15% of, was spooked by his taking of greenmail and instituted a variety of anti-takeover measures while preemptively putting themselves up onto the auction block to avoid a Perelman takeover.¹⁰² Whatever his intentions may have been, he never acted on them. As a part of Transworld's restructuring in 1988, he sold his stake.¹⁰²

The third charge of greenmailing levied against him was the best-known and stemmed from his attempt to purchase Gillette in November 1986. Perelman opened negotiations with a bid of $4.12 billion. Gillette responded with an unsuccessful lawsuit and public insinuations of insider trading. Perelman accumulated 13.8% of Gillette before he made what he would later call the worst decision he ever made and sold his stake to Gillette later that month for a $34 million profit. Gillette had put word out that Ralston Purina had agreed to buy a 20% block of stock, making any attempt by Perelman to buy Gillette much more difficult.

Perelman decided to sell his share to Ralston Purina, but before he did so Gillette's executives called him up, asking if he'd sell his shares to them and they'd sell the shares to Ralston Purina. He sold his shares to Gillette, Ralston backed out of the deal, and Perelman was left feeling a little foolish for having been tricked into taking greenmail.⁷¹ Undeterred by the agreement he signed declaring he wouldn't attempt a hostile takeover of Gillette for at least 10 years, he waited until June 1987 to attempt a friendly takeover. Opening bidding at $4.66 billion, Perelman gradually upped his bid over the following months to $5.7 billion to no avail. Gillette's management had no interest in selling, insisting they were worth at least $55 a share.¹⁰⁴ In October 1987, Perelman finally gave up and withdrew his offer.¹⁰⁵

Monica Lewinsky

Perelman stumbled into the Lewinsky scandal. In early 1998, Vernon Jordan recommended Monica Lewinsky to Perelman as a potential employee, pitching her as a very smart young woman. This was not business as usual. While Jordan was on the Revlon board of directors, Jordan rarely spoke to Perelman and had never recommended anyone to him. Jordan indicated he'd already talked about Lewinsky with MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings vice president, Jaymie Durnan. Durnan told Perelman that she had determined there was no position available for Lewinsky at Perelman's company, but that she had forwarded Lewinsky's resume to Revlon. Perelman claims to have been as surprised as anyone when he found out about the Lewinsky-Clinton connection later that month.¹⁰⁶ He found that Revlon had already made a job offer which was quickly withdrawn, but it was too late; Revlon and Perelman were all over the scandal.¹⁰⁷

Panavision

In April 2001, M&F Worldwide bought Perelman's 83% stake in Panavision for $128 million. This would be unremarkable except that Perelman controlled M&F Worldwide and the price paid for his stake was four times market value. At the time, M&F Worldwide was a healthy company with an excellent balance sheet while Panavision was bleeding red ink. M&F Worldwide's other shareholders cried foul, alleging the only person who stood to benefit from the deal was Perelman. They took their complaints to the courts.¹⁰⁸ Perelman insisted the deal was an excellent one and in the best interest of the shareholders because Panavision was well-positioned to profit from the move to digital cinematography.¹⁰⁹ The share price tumbled from six to three after the deal and reflected M&F Worldwide shareholders' lack of confidence.¹¹⁰ Perelman tried to pacify M&F Worldwide's shareholders with a $15 million settlement, but the judge rejected it as grossly inadequate. Ultimately, Perelman agreed to undo the deal, making M&F Worldwide shareholder's, and the share price, jump with joy.¹¹¹

Fred Tepperman

Perelman hired Fred Tepperman as his CFO after Tepperman left Warner Communications in 1985. Starting with Pantry Pride, Tepperman worked on every single business deal Perelman orchestrated throughout Tepperman's seven-year stint at MacAndrews & Forbes. Tepperman's tenure came to an abrupt end just after Christmas in 1991 when Perelman fired him for being derelict in his duties. Tepperman had been distracted for the past year by his Alzheimers-afflicted wife of 30 years. He had been taking longer vacations, he kept shorter hours at the office that precluded Perelman's famous breakfast meetings, and he seemed generally distracted and distraught. According to Tepperman, Perelman once told him to not look sad in front of bankers because it made them nervous. A clause in Tepperman's contract entitled him to a large portion of his salary and benefits in the event of an injury that prevented him from being able to work; an injury which Tepperman claimed he had in fact suffered, albeit of a psychological nature, as a result of the effect his wife's condition had on him. His demands totaled up to $30 million. That number stems partially from Tepperman's salary, which started at $275,000 and rose to $1.2 million in 1990¹¹² and partially from his large benefits package, which included a luxury car of a brand of his choice.¹¹³ Perelman was quick to file a countersuit for fraud, claiming that Tepperman had sneakily changed the company's retirement plan in such a way that Tepperman would personally gain millions of dollars.¹¹²

It took over three years for the case to make it to court. Tepperman's attorney, Barry Slotnick, charged that the breakfast meetings were nothing but a podium Perelman used to boast about his sexual conquests, and thus Tepperman was merely avoiding pointless meetings, as any worker would. His long vacations were declared to not be an issue on account of telecommuting; he could do his job just as well in Florida as in New York. Perelman's attorney Stanley Arkin argued that Tepperman was unable to perform his job, had refused to accept this, and was justifiably fired. Stanley revealed earlier in the case that Tepperman was actually living with his wife's nurse, damaging his reputation as a devoted husband who was just looking out for his wife. Slotnick responded that his wife's family were aware of the arrangement, believing it necessary for Tepperman to move on with his life. The only witness to take the stand was Tepperman, who testified for six days, before the case ended with a sealed settlement.¹¹²

Notes and references

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Persondata
NAME	Perelman, Ronald Owen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Businessman, investor
DATE OF BIRTH	January 1, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH	Greensboro, North Carolina, United States
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH