Rice family to make more than $1 billion from sale of Rice Energy

Gas producer EQT Corp. has agreed to buy Rice Energy Corp. for $6.7 billion. The Rice family, who control about 18% of Rice Energy’s shares, will make more than $1 billion from the deal,

the

Wall Street Journal

reported.

In late 2015, after a warm winter, Rice Energy’s stock fell, and the family sold shares they had borrowed against. “Had they been able to hang on to those five million shares, the family would now be nearly $100 million richer,” the

Journal

article said.

Daniel Rice III, who had been a mutual-fund manager specializing in energy at BlackRock Inc., founded the company with his sons a decade ago, when shale-gas production was just starting.

He resigned from BlackRock after the

Journal

reported on a Rice Energy deal to drill in areas controlled by a coal company that his BlackRock fund invested in. Daniel Rice III is now a Rice Energy board member and a portfolio manager for GRT Capital Partners LLC of Boston, the article said.

Daniel Rice IV is Rice Energy’s CEO, Toby Rice is COO and Derek Rice is executive vice president of exploration. Another brother, Ryan, is a petroleum engineer, and Toby’s wife, Aileen, is vice president of land.

The company went public in 2014. The family owned a third of the company’s shares at the time, the article said.  (Source:

Wall Street Journal

, June 26, 2017.)