He's back! OK, well maybe or maybe not when it comes to further involvement in shipping bets, but master investor Wilbur Ross is heading back to Wall Street with his eyes on a $345m blank cheque initial public offering in industrial sectors that include transportation.
He also has a couple of interesting names as part of his management team.
Ross, himself the former chairman of Connecticut-based tanker owner Diamond S Shipping, has tapped current Diamond chairman Nadim Qureshi as his "head of mergers and acquisitions" in the new venture.
Ross has also brought in Steven Toy as his chief financial officer.
Both Qureshi and Toy formerly worked for Ross at his eponymous WL Ross & Co private equity firm before it was sold to Invesco. They then held senior management roles with Invesco during the time Ross was making his first shipping investments in companies such as Diamond S.
Both Qureshi and Toy left Invesco last September to form their own private-equity firm, BroadPeak Global, although it is understood they maintain close ties with Invesco.
WL Ross remains the largest holder in Diamond S with 9m shares and 22% of the company. And, despite leaving Invesco, Qureshi has stayed on as board chairman, fuelling the talk of close cooperation with his new firm.
What any of this may have to do with Ross' Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (Spac) plans is highly speculative at best.
Now that he has served out his term as US commerce secretary under former President Donald Trump, Ross, 83, appears to be ready for some new challenges.
The legendary "King of Bankruptcy" has become the latest celebrity financier to head up a Spac, tapping a market that was all the rage in the US equity space during Covid-hit 2020 and continues white hot into 2021.
Spacs, or "blank cheque" companies, involve raising a blind pool of capital from investors who trust a sponsor to find a business opportunity that will be more highly valued by public markets than it is in private ones.
While Spacs have a history in shipping, leading to the founding of dry bulk owners Star Bulk Carriers and Navios Maritime some 15 years ago, they are a tough ask in more recent years, as existing public shipowners often trade at discounts to net asset value.
The prospectus for Ross' filing sounds agnostic as to industrial sectors, although he references potential acquisitions in the auto, energy, transportation or other verticals that may see disruption from a "fourth industrial revolution".
Besides bankrolling the expansion of Diamond S as an owner of clean product and crude tanker tonnage in 2011, Ross also held investments in LPG player Navigator Holdings and private TRF Recovery Fund, among others.
He stepped away from such investments as a condition of becoming Trump's commerce secretary. Ross sold his holdings in Invesco in December 2017.
Ross will become chief executive of the new venture, whose directors also include Larry Kudlow, the former chief economic advisor to Trump.
