Two politically connected brothers who fled the Castro regime and later built a sugar empire in Florida agreed yesterday to purchase the Domino Sugar company for $180 million.
Alfonso and J. Pepe Fanjul visited with workers at the Baltimore plant on Key Highway yesterday and said they plan no layoffs or management changes.
They intend to keep both the Domino brand name and, to the relief of local preservationists, the 120-foot red neon sign that has illuminated Baltimore's harbor from atop the plant for five decades.
"We view Domino as synonymous with sugar in America, and we are very excited because it fits very well in our plan," Alfonso Fanjul (pronounced fan-HOOL) said in an interview at the plant. "We could not conceive of a better brand."
The Fanjuls have been trying since the 1980s to acquire Domino, including an unsuccessful bid in 1988 when it was sold to current owner Tate & Lyle PLC of London for $305 million.
Officials at Tate & Lyle said they are selling the company because U.S. price supports are keeping the cost of raw sugar high and erasing the Domino refinery's margins. Domino, they said, is losing money on every pound of sugar it sells.
But those price supports are a boon to the Fanjuls, who have one of the largest sugar-producing companies in Florida, farming about 180,000 acres of sugar cane fields in Palm Beach County. They are fifth-generation sugar growers who moved to the United States from Cuba in 1960.
The Domino acquisition will add to their vertically integrated company, which is involved in every aspect of sugar producing, from farming to refining to distribution of the finished product.
The Fanjuls give hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates and parties each year, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission and a company spokesman. Recipients include the campaigns of George W. Bush, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Spencer Abraham of Michigan, now U.S. energy secretary.
Pepe Fanjul, 57, is a Republican and served as Bob Dole's finance chairman in Florida during his 1996 bid for the White House. Alfonso Fanjul, 64, is a Democrat and served as Bill Clinton's finance chairman in the same election.
The Fanjuls will fold their sugar refinery in Yonkers, N.Y., into the Domino operations, giving Domino four refineries - two in New York, one in Louisiana and the Baltimore plant. Combined, the four facilities will produce 2 million tons of sugar a year and have revenue of about $1 billion.
