Rival Lampoon Suitors Raise Takeover Offers

The bidding for National Lampoon heated up Thursday as two separate investor groups spent the day sweetening their offers for the New York magazine publisher.

The day opened with a bid from an investment group led by Los Angeles entertainment executive Mark E. Shanker. His group offered $6.75 for each of National Lampoon’s 1.6 million shares and 50 cents for each of its outstanding stock warrants.

Shanker’s $11.05-million cash offer for National Lampoon exceeded the $10.1-million cash offer made by a group led by Los Angeles television executive Anthony Cassara on Wednesday. Cassara responded by increasing his offer to $11.58 million in cash, or $7 a share and 75 cents for each warrant.

Not to be outdone, Shanker, who quit his job as executive vice president at Nelson Entertainment on Thursday to lead the takeover group, boosted his bid to $11.74 million in cash, or $7.10 a share and 75 cents for each warrant.

National Lampoon Chairman Matty Simmons said in a telephone interview from New York that the company’s board planned to meet Thursday night to review the bids. The company previously rejected as inadequate a $6.4-million bid late last week from Vestron Inc., a Stamford, Conn., distributor of videocassettes and films.

Simmons said all of the offers for the company, which publishes the satirical National Lampoon magazine, were friendly. “There isn’t anything hostile going on here,” he said.

A spokesman for Shanker said he was not available for comment on Thursday, and telephone calls to Cassara’s office at Wometco, where he is president of the West Los Angeles operator of Miami and Asheville, N.C., television stations, were not returned.

National Lampoon’s shares rose in over-the-counter trading Thursday, closing at $6.50 a share, up $1.875.