PERELMAN, RONALD OWEN

PERELMAN, RONALD OWEN (1943– ), U.S. financier. To many people, Perelman symbolized the corporate-raider rogue of the 1980s, a highly visible and aggressive businessman who achieved power and immense wealth by buying and selling companies. His strategy usually involved the issuance of "junk bonds," high-yield, high-risk instruments often likely to default. His private life – his extravagant homes, multiple marriages, and a bitter child-custody case – was sometimes as high-profile and controversial as his professional deeds. At the same time, Perelman, a devout Jew, contributed millions to Jewish-related causes, including the Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Judaic Studies, endowed in 1995 at Princeton University in New Jersey. Perelman began his career in Philadelphia, where he was raised. In 1966, after earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. at the University's Wharton School of Business, he went to work for his father, Raymond Perelman, the owner of a sheet-metal business. When he was 35, he moved to New York to strike out on his own. In 1979, with the aid of a $1.7 million loan from his first wife, a Philadelphia heiress, he purchased 40 per cent of Cohen Hatfield Industries, a jewelry store operator. He stripped the company of its non-performing assets and within a short time had the leverage to acquire MacAndrews & Forbes, a holding company, for $45.7 million. He sold its cyclical textile business, but kept its two biggest generators of cash, a licorice-extract business and a chocolate company, selling the latter in 1986 for $45 million. By issuing millions of dollars in junk bonds, Perelman was also able to buy a series of diverse companies, including Consolidated Cigars, Movie Labs, Technicolor, Video Corp. and Pantry Pride. In 1986, he completed one of the decade's most bitterly contested take-overs, acquiring 83% of Revlon, the venerable cosmetics and fragrance giant founded by charles h. revson in 1923. Revlon, once dominant in the beauty business, had been struggling for years and Perelman saw an opportunity to get it at a price lower than its potential. Opposed by Revlon's board, he fought a long and contentious court battle and was able to win the company in a $1.8 billion leveraged buyout, becoming chairman. Reversing the decline of the fading but well-known firm proved daunting. Already beset by thinning margins, increasing competition, a loss of department store business, and an ill-fated plunge into health care products, Revlon had accumulated close to $1 billion in debt, which Perelman assumed when he took over. A publicly owned firm when Perelman acquired it, Revlon went private in 1987, remaining so until 1996, when it was again listed on the New York Stock Exchange. That did not keep it from falling even deeper into debt and Perelman was forced to use hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money to keep Revlon afloat. His personal fortune, once estimated at $6.5 billion, had fallen to half that figure by 2004, when Revlon's debt load was approaching $2 billion. At the same time, the company – which had not recorded a profit since 1997 – was embarking on a program aimed at halving its debt in two years. (Mort Sheinman (2nd ed.)