Free Enterprise-Buckley Style
Free Enterprise—Buckley Style Most of the Buckley family's notoriety has derived from William F. Buckley Jr.'s career as an editor, writer, and tele-vision personality, and from James Buckley's...
...The public corporations that were spun off by William Buckley Sr...
...William Buckley Sr.'s original oil business was called the Pantepec Corporation...
...A stacked board of directors meeting, which included representatives from the banks that had made loans to Sitco, ap-proved the plan, but in 1976 a group of dissident stockholders filed suit and the SEC initiated an investigation...
...and United Canso...
...Catawba, run and owned by the Buckley family, would own a Controlling share of new publicly funded corporations that Buckley would create...
...When the theaters continued losing money, Buckley proposed that SBC buy the theaters from Sitco and absorb the personal debts of the partners...
...The general issue raised by the SEC investigation was whether the Buckleys, through the fam-ily-held Catawba Corporation, had been milking public corporations of the assets contributed by thousands of public Investors...
...Some stockholders of Coastal Caribbean, a Catawba Company with holdings in Florida, threatened legal action on the grounds that the Company was paying large yearly fees to Catawba, but was not earning any income...
...The government reimbursed companies for their equipment, but since Pantepec leased its land to other companies for drilling, it received little compensation...
...This year, the same stockholders chal-lenged the Buckley slate for control of the Magellan Corporation, but they were narrowly defeated...
...These publicly financed corporations explored for oil and minerals in such places as Austra-lia, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Israel, Spain, the Spanish Sahara, the Sudan, Fiji, Thailand, the Philippines, and Venezuela...
...The suit, which could cost Buckley and the Starrs con-siderably more money, has still not been settled...
...The attention has hardly been flattering...
...But Catawba was replaced by Gherardi and O'Donnell's firm, and the boards of directors continued to be dominated by Buckley associates...
...Catawba cronies would dominate the boards of these corporations, and the top offices would be reserved, in most cases, for John Buckley, John's brother-in-law, Benjamin Heath, and such old family friends and associates as C. Dean Reasoner, Arthur B. O'Donnell, and Frank P. Gherardi...
...After World War II, disputes among several Pantepec partners per-suaded Buckley to initiate new ventures through a Consulting firm, the Catawba Corporation...
...Furthermore, the dissident stockholders filed suit against Catawba for what they charged was an illegal pay-ment of almost $3.2 million made to Catawba for the sale of United Canso's oil holdings in the North Sea...
...Buckley and the Starrs were forced to resign and reimburse the Company, which was finally sold to the Disney-owned Shamrock Corporation...
...In 1957, National Review, which Buckley and sis-ter Priscilla own, bought a radio Station in Omaha...
...In 1971, Buckley, Peter and Michael Starr, and another Starr executive set up Sitco, Ltd., to make Investments...
...has never been a public officer of any Catawba-run corporation, but he has gone into business on his own, using his considerable income from family holdings...
...The Securities and Exchange Commis-sion (SEC) then decided to investigate Catawba's Operations...
...But a group of dissident United Canso stockholders balked at the merger and continued Buckley family control over the corporations...
...In 1979, Minex, Inc., a newly formed Buckley corporation, initiated a merger with Pancoastal, Valmex...
...After a faltering Start, it pros-pered under the management of Peter Starr, a former hand'on Buckley's yacht...
...In 1980, they ran a competing slate of directors and won...
...The SEC investigation concluded they had...
...In 1956, Pantepec suffered a setback when Venezuela nationalized its oil holdings...
...In 1976, Catawba suffered a different kind of setback...
...J.J...
...In addition, the corporations would pay Catawba a Consulting fee and royalties for its Services...
...With inter-est-free loans from SBC and bank loans from SBC's banks using SBC stock as collateral, Sitco purchased a string of drive-in theaters in Texas and some property in Florida...
...The issue was similar to the Catawba case...
...In 1965, National Review so\d the Station to Buckley and Starr, who formed the Starr Broadcasting Company (SBC...
...Free Enterprise—Buckley Style Most of the Buckley family's notoriety has derived from William F. Buckley Jr.'s career as an editor, writer, and tele-vision personality, and from James Buckley's service in the Senate and in the Reagan State Department...
...As sons of a rough-and-tumble entrepreneur—a "buccaneer capitalist"—John and William have operated their enterprises on the shad-owy edges of legality...
...Besides the radio Station, SBC owned Arlhus Publishing, which ran Arlington House, a right-wing Publishing firm, and the Conservative Book Club...
...The dissident stockholders claim that the supposedly (and by law) neutral directors who ap-proved the large payment, along with a royalty, included a long-time Buckley associate and a Buckley brother-in-law...
...But since 1976, some attention has also focused on the Buckley family businesses—both the main business, run by John Buckley, and Bill Buckley's Starr Broadcasting Corporation...
...Had Buckley and Starr used their Position in a publicly held corporation to advance their own interests at the ex-pense of the stockholders...
...In 1969, Starr became a public corporation and with the funds it raised it began buying more radio stations...
...and later by John Buckley, who assumed the presidency of Catawba after his father's death, included Pancoastal, Canada Southern, Magellan, and United Canso oil and mining corporations...
...An SEC investigation tends to east a pall over a public corporation, the value of whose stock offerings depends upon public confidence...
...In 1978, John Buckley resigned as an executive with the various Catawba-run corporations and terminated Catawba's Consulting relationship with them...
Vol. 45 • September 1981 • No. 9
