Quaker Fabric executive wins award
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Larry Liebenow, president and chief executive officer of Quaker Fabric Corp. in Fall River, Mass., has been chosen by the United States Chamber of Commerce to receive this year’s Dennis Sheehan Award. Liebenow, who is chairman of the Chamber’s International Policy Committee, has long advocated increased trade with China and supported the Chamber’s TradeRoots trade education effort. The Sheehan award is named for a former Chamber president and is given annually to the board member who captures the late president’s spirit and enthusiasm and goes “beyond the call of duty” in his service to the Chamber.
Charges against Quaker Fabric dismissed
FALL RIVER – Charges of inadequate disclosure concerning a stock offering in 1998 by Quaker Fabric Corporation have been dismissed in U.S. District Court in Boston. The charges were filed in September 1998 against the company and some of its officers and directors. District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock found that “none of the allegations” supported a securities law claim against any of the defendants. Quaker Fabric is a manufacturer of woven upholstery fabrics for the furniture market in the United States and abroad, and reportedly the largest producer of Jacquard upholstery fabric in the world.
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First genome-based capital firm founded
CAMBRIDGE – Applied Genomic Technology Capital Fund LP has been organized as the first venture capital fund focusing exclusively on the formation of companies that sell genome-related products and services to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The company, which also has offices in San Francisco, announced that it planned to form at least 30 companies over the next three years. These companies will apply genetic information and discoveries to computer software and Internet technology, the Boston Globe reported.
MCK Communications buying Dallas firm
NEEDHAM – MCK Communications which sells systems that enable businesses to link telecommunicators and branch offices to phone and data networks is buying Digital Techniques, Inc. of Dallas for $24 million in cash, stock and assumed options. According to the Boston Globe, MCK’s objective in the purchase is to add to its engineering staff and gain access to new markets, principally in Texas. DTI develops systems that enhance private branch exchanges {PBXes} and products used at call centers. DTI’s 50 employees will be added to MCK’s 120.
NetScout buying NextPoint for $60 million
WESTFORD – NetScout Systems, Inc. announced that it planned to buy NextPoint Networks, also of Westford, for $60 million in cash and stock. NetScout develops software that permits companies to monitor response times of business transactions through their networks. Through this acquisition, NetScout will be able to offer Web monitoring services for e-business.
$9 movie ticket coming to Boston
BOSTON – General Cinema Corp. announced that it would charge adults $9 for tickets to its 13-screen complex that opened last week at the Landmark Center on Brookline Avenue near Fenway Park. The price for seniors and children will be $6, General Cinema said. The company attributed the higher prices to the increase in the cost of maintaining modern theaters and the expense of converting an old warehouse building into the theater complex. Located on the site of the old Sears Roebuck warehouse, the theater complex will feature stadium style seating and digital sound in all its theaters. It will also have large screens, the largest 62 feet wide and 27 feet tall. This complex will be General Cinema’s first foray into Boston since the 1970s. The most recent theater complex built in Boston is Loews’ 11-screen center at Copley Place where the screens are tiny by comparison. It was built in 1984. Movie attendance in Boston has declined in recent years and the city is listed near the bottom of major cities in terms of attendance, the Boston Globe reported. General Cinema also plans to build a 19-screen theater complex at Millenium Place near The Common, as well as an 11-screen complex in Kenmore Square, both complexes equipped similarly to the complex at Landmark Center.
Loews withdraws from Roxbury site
BOSTON – Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corp. has withdrawn its proposal to build a 12 theater cinema at the Crosstown Center in Lower Roxbury, a commercial complex being built at Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard. Loews blamed the developer’s failure to meet deadlines for obtaining necessary approvals from the city and state. The developer has since obtained the approvals, an executive for Crosstown Associates, the developer, reported to the Boston Globe. He added that the withdrawal by Loews presented an opportunity to add more office space to the site which is scheduled for opening in the summer of 2001. Loews also reported that financial conditions in the cinema industry were not conducive to theater building at this time.
Nvest being bought by French firm
BOSTON – Nvest LP, an asset manager based here, is being acquired by CDC Asset Management, the money management arm of Caisse des Depots et Consignations of France for an estimated $2.2 billion in cash and assumed debt, the Boston Globe reported. The combined companies will have estimated assets of about $300 billion. Metropolitan Life Insurance of New York which obtained a 48 percent interest in Nvest when it acquired The New England lie insurance company in 1996, will give up that interest but will retain its interest in State Street Research & Investment, another Boston fund firm. CDC, which had been unsuccessful previously in its attempts to get into the mutual fund market in the United States, is hoping that the acquisition of Nvest will be the key to its entry into that market.
(Compiled from news reports and releases, print and electronic.)
