Chris-Craft May Sell Its Warner Stake : Retains Bear, Stearns to Analyze Prospective Bids

Chris-Craft Industries, apparently willing to end its role as the largest shareholder of Warner Communications, has retained Bear, Stearns & Co. “to analyze any prospective offers concerning their holdings in Warner Communications,” Jeff Bloomberg, a general partner in the New York investment banking firm, said Friday.

Bear, Stearns has been retained for “about a week,” Bloomberg said, but he insisted that the firm has “not solicited the sale of any assets or divisions of Warner Communications.” Nor has Chris-Craft received any formal offers for its 29% stake in Warner, Bloomberg said.

The banker’s statements came in the wake of published reports that Chris-Craft and Warner want to end their 16-month relationship. Warner accepted Chris-Craft as a “friendly” investor last year when it was trying to fight off an unwelcome takeover threat posed by Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch.

As first reported by The Times in March, sources have said that Warner Chairman Steven J. Ross is anxious to regain control, possibly by taking the company private through a leveraged buy-out. On Friday, a source close to Chris-Craft Chairman Herbert J. Siegel indicated that Siegel would not object to such a plan.

‘Can’t Live Together’

“Herb’s preference is to (extricate Chris-Craft) in a manner that would assure the company’s control to Warner’s historical management,” the source said. At the same time, however, he reiterated Siegel’s reported concern that any buy-out proposal be “fair to all shareholders.”

Ross and Siegel “can’t live together in a business deal,” the source said, but the two men are conversing outside the board room. “It isn’t open warfare,” he said.

In the past week, other publications have described the Ross-Siegel relationship as “stormy” or “not very happy.” The suspected Ross-Siegel rift has attracted investments by stock speculators, propelling the stock to a 52-week high of $30.50 last Monday. On Friday, the stock fell $1.125 to close at $28.875 as 1.16 million shares changed hands, making it the day’s 14th most active stock.

When asked to comment, Warner Vice President Geoffrey W. Holmes said Friday: “Steve Ross has always said the relationship is very good.”

Holmes confirmed, however, that William Siegel, a son of the Chris-Craft chairman who had been working on divestitures and acquisitions for Warner for about a year, left Warner’s employ sometime last week. A source close to Chris-Craft said the younger Siegel has joined his father’s company.

“That doesn’t mean a deterioration in the relationship,” Holmes said. “We are basically through the divestiture period, and that was what Bill was doing.”

In response to a question, Holmes said that Warner continues to retain the investment firm of Lazard Freres to guide the “asset redeployment” plan begun in March, 1984, when Warner began selling off a number of its businesses to offset losses in its former Atari video-game and home-computer unit. But Holmes insisted that “neither Warner nor any authorized representative has contacted anybody regarding the possible sale of any of our core businesses.”

Holmes identified those businesses as the Warner Bros. motion picture and television unit, recorded-music and music publishing and other publishing operations.

Interest in Motown

Earlier this week, The Times reported that Motown Record President Jay Lasker said that his company had been approached to determine its interest in buying the recorded-music division of Warner. Lasker declined to say who approached Motown, however, and he has not been available for further comment.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that executives at two record companies said that Bear, Stearns had approached them about potential interest in Warner’s record unit. Bloomberg refuted that report.