Benihana, the Miami-based operator of Japanese restaurants, has hired a financial adviser to help sell the company,
the
South Florida Business Journal
reported.
The company announced it was seeking a sale after averting a proxy battle.
An earlier
South Florida Business Journal
report
said that two groups of dissident shareholders — Benihana of Tokyo (BOT), a company belonging to the family of the late company founder, Rocky Aoki, as well as New York hedge fund Coliseum Capital Management — would place representatives on the board.
The move follows a major shakeup within BOT, which owns a Benihana restaurant in Hawaii and is an international franchisor. Rocky Aoki’s children lost control of the company after his widow, Keiko Ono Aoki, won a battle in New York State Curt on Aug. 31.
A July 22
DailyFinance
article noted
that Rocky Aoki led a complex life.
In New York, he had three children with wife Chizuro Aoki and, at the same time, he had fathered kids in California with mistress Pamela Hillberger and at least one other girlfriend. [He later divorced Chizuro Aoki, married Hillberger and had two more children with her before divorcing her in 1991.] In 2002 he married his third wife, the former Keiko Ono. By then, his six children … were fully grown — and they didn’t approve of their new stepmother. Shortly after the marriage, the Aoki kids launched an unsuccessful attempt to get Keiko to sign a post-nuptial agreement renouncing any claim on Benihana. The plan backfired.
(Sources:
South Florida Business Journal,
Sept. 22, 2010 and Sept. 23, 2010;
DailyFinance,
July 22, 2010.)
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