An investor group led by KKR & Co. has agreed to acquire most of Samson Investment Co., a family-owned oil and natural gas company based in Tulsa, Okla., for $7.2 billion. The transaction is the year’s largest corporate leveraged buyout,
Bloomberg reported.
The investor group will buy all of Samson’s assets except its onshore Gulf Coast and deep-water Gulf of Mexico assets. The Schusterman family, which founded the company in 1971, will continue to own the Gulf assets, the article said.
Samson owns interests in more than 10,000 wells, including 4,000 that it operates in the U.S., the Bloomberg report said.
Samson’s founder, petroleum engineer Charles Schusterman, died in 2000. His daughter, Stacy Schusterman, became co-CEO in 1999 and assumed full control in 2005, the article said.
An accompanying Bloomberg profile
said Samson was the largest U.S. oil and gas company with a woman as CEO.
When her father was diagnosed with leukemia in 1983, he chose Stacy over her two brothers as his successor, the article said.
During her tenure as CEO, Stacy Schusterman gradually shifted the company’s drilling strategy to take on riskier, more expensive projects and include more oil in the company’s portfolio. She sold Samson’s international assets to refocus on U.S. shale fields….
(Sources: Bloomberg, Nov. 25, 2011.)
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