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Pierre Brondeau, a highly regarded executive who was supposed to preserve the Rohm & Haas Co. culture and legacy in Philadelphia when Dow Chemical Co. bought the company this year, has taken a new job as the chief executive of FMC Corp.
FMC, which manufactures industrial and agricultural chemicals and has headquarters in Center City, announced Brondeau's hiring yesterday.
Brondeau, 52, will join the FMC board and assume his new position as chief executive officer and president Jan. 1. He will earn a base salary of $900,000 and receive a signing bonus of $3 million in FMC stock that vests in three years, according to an FMC regulatory filing.
Brondeau said in a telephone interview that he had several job offers and chose FMC because the company had a "great portfolio" of businesses. "It's not a turnaround situation at all," he said.
Brondeau had announced he would retire from Rohm & Haas in July as Dow began eliminating employees in the Philadelphia headquarters and consolidating operations with those of Dow, which is based in Midland, Mich.
Brondeau said it was "very hard for me to see so many employees leaving" Rohm & Haas. He retired because he wanted to run a publicly traded corporation, he said.
FMC, with headquarters on the 1700 block of Market Street, reported third-quarter revenues of $713.3 million and profits of $28 million.
FMC spokesman Jim Fitzwater said Brondeau was considered an "exceptional talent among peers" by the FMC board of directors, which began seeking a new top executive earlier this year.
Current FMC chief executive William G. Walter, 64, is approaching mandatory retirement and will remain as chairman of the FMC board until the end of September, the company said.
Brondeau had been expected to lead a Dow division in Philadelphia after Dow purchased Rohm & Haas in an all-debt, $15.7 billion deal.
But the friendly merger between Dow and Rohm & Haas devolved into rancor amid the global economic collapse in late 2008. Dow's good deal in July 2008 looked like disaster by December.
Dow asked to delay the multibillion-dollar merger because of the bad economy and because a deal with Kuwait's government to form a joint venture had fallen apart. That deal would have raised $7 billion to $9 billion in cash for the Rohm & Haas acquisition.
Rohm & Haas refused and sued in Delaware to force Dow to honor the merger contract. The two companies spent millions of dollars on lawyers and sparred publicly as they prepared for a March trial.
Dow warned that if it bought Rohm & Haas under the original terms it would almost immediately default on the terms of its bank covenants, and that the banks could take control of the giant chemical company.
In last-minute negotiations leading up to the trial in southern Delaware, Dow agreed to purchase Rohm & Haas under the original terms. To help the beleaguered chemical giant, Philadelphia's Haas family and a Wall Street hedge-fund operator lent Dow $3 billion. Dow gained possession of Rohm & Haas on April 1.
Dow said the huge debt for buying Rohm & Haas would lead to deep employee cutbacks and began laying off Rohm & Haas employees at the headquarters in July.
Raj Gupta, who engineered the sale of Rohm & Haas to Dow, had said he would retire when the deal closed, leaving the top Philadelphia position open for Brondeau.
But Brondeau announced his retirement in late July and was replaced by 30-year Dow executive Jerome Peribere, 55. Peribere had managed Dow's Indianapolis-based agricultural business.
Contact staff writer Bob Fernandez at 215-854-5897 or bob.fernandez@phillynews.com.
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