Insurance titan in bid to buy New York Times

Insurance titan in bid to buy New York Times
Seeking to break Sulzberger family's hold on media empire

Billionaire insurance titan Maurice "Hank" Greenberg has begun buying huge blocks of New York Times stock to break the Sulzberger family's stranglehold on the media empire, The Post has learned.

Sources confirmed that the famously combative Greenberg has been buying hundreds of thousands of Times shares, but did not disclose the exact number or the size of the stake he wants to own.

Greenberg has both the assets - Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.2 billion - and the temperament to jump into a fight over the future of the stumbling newspaper giant.

A major stock position would put Greenberg in league with already angry Times' shareholders, such as Morgan Stanley Investment Management, to battle the board over whether the founding Ochs-Sulzberger family should hold a powerful class of stock that accounts for a majority of the voting power at the company.

A Times spokeswoman said the Ochs-Sulzberger family has given no indication that it wishes to change the so-called dual-class structure.

Sources said Greenberg views the Times, which has a market cap of $3.3 billion, as a top-flight brand but one with an "artificially depressed" stock price.

Times shares have plunged almost 15 percent in the last year, a drop that has put enormous pressure on Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., the family scion who has been at the helm of the company since 1997.

The stock is well off its 52-week high of $28.98 that it hit in February. In November 2004, Times shares traded above $40 before they began their free-fall.

On Nov. 13, the New York Times reported that Greenberg was considering a bid for the Tribune Company or Dow Jones, and consulting with bankers and lawyers about a possible offer.

Shareholder watchdogs have slammed Times management as overpaid - criticism that forced Sulzberger and his cousin, Vice Chairman Michael Golden, to say in September they would forgo about $2 million in stock awards and pump it into a bonus pool for the company's employees.

Greenberg, a legendary figure in the New York financial community, ran AIG for nearly 40 years before being deposed in a bitter boardroom coup after New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer alleged the company engaged in accounting improprieties.

Spitzer eventually filed charges against Greenberg and ex-AIG CFO Howard Smith. Fighting back bitterly in the courts and the media, Greenberg eventually got Spitzer to drop all criminal charges against him.

Spitzer is still pursuing civil charges against Greenberg, although he has dropped two of his six original allegations.

A Greenberg spokesman declined to discuss the specifics of his investment in the Times, but told The Post, "Mr. Greenberg is interested in exploring several options with respect to media companies."