Bond Receptive to Takeover Bid by L.A. Investor

A spokesman for the troubled Bond Corp. Holdings Ltd. said the company is willing to hear from Jeff Reynolds, a Los Angeles businessman who announced over the weekend that he wanted to take control of the Australian company.

Bond Corp. executive Peter Lucas said Sunday that the company “looked forward to the next communication” from Reynolds but added that so far the proposal was lacking in detail.

On Saturday, Reynolds, 28, announced in Los Angeles that he was prepared to invest $250 million in Bond Corp. and in return take control of the company, whose brewing interests are now in the hands of receivers. The breweries include G. Heileman Brewing Co. of La Crosse, Wis.

He said he was confident that he could refinance the company’s $6-billion debt and would talk again with multimillionaire businessman Alan Bond once the Victorian Supreme Court hearing into the receivership is over.

In a telephone interview Sunday in Houston, Reynolds said he planned to travel to Perth in the coming weeks to discuss details of the bid with Bond.

“I’m scheduled to go back over to Perth shortly to work out definitive agreements,” Reynolds said. “This is something we’ve been working on since September.”

Reynolds, chairman of Los Angeles-based Weatherby Investments, said California Pacific International Holdings Co. Pte Ltd., the Singapore-based parent firm of Weatherby, had been interested in buying Bond for some time.

“We had been looking for a lot of opportunities,” Reynolds said. “We had a manager in Singapore who had some relationship with Bond and we opted to pursue that.”

A report in Saturday’s London Times said Reynolds got the idea for a Bond Corp. takeover from California Pacific’s managing director, Chew Chin Han, a friend of Australian businessman Kerry Packer.

Reynolds said in the interview that he believes Bond’s brewery interests remain healthy. He said Weatherby’s main interests include oil, gas and financing.