Today in Globe Business
Representatives of Caritas Christi Health Care, the private equity firm seeking to buy it, and the attorney general’s office are working on a tentative agreement to protect the retirement plans of 13,000 employees and keep the chain’s hospitals open for at least five years.
With state regulators preparing to rule soon on the proposed sale to Cerberus Capital Management, the parties have been locked in frantic negotiations in recent weeks. The talks intensified after Caritas discovered an additional $45 million shortfall in its unfunded pension liability and critics of the deal pressed for the New York firm to be held to stringent conditions, according to people familiar with the talks.
Those people, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said the buyout plan twice fell apart during the three-way negotiations, but was salvaged. Ralph de la Torre, the Caritas chief executive, played shuttle diplomat during the talks, conveying the positions of Cerberus and Attorney General Martha Coakley, the three people said.
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State taking a hard look at disclosure practices
The state’s top bank regulators said yesterday that they plan to scrutinize the foreclosures made by major national mortgage lenders in Massachusetts, following mounting reports of errors in such proceedings across the country.
Barbara Anthony, undersecretary of the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation, said the state will examine procedures to make sure lenders are following the law. The move follows decisions by Bank of America Corp. and other major lenders to temporarily freeze foreclosures in other states over concerns that errors were made.
“The Massachusetts Division of Banks has extensive safeguards in place to ensure that homeowners facing foreclosure receive the strong protections they deserve,’’ said Anthony, adding that the state will “coordinate appropriate actions with federal and state enforcement authorities to ensure compliance with Massachusetts requirements.’’
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EMC and Cisco back Holyoke data center
Technology giants EMC Corp. and Cisco Systems, Inc. will together contribute $5 million to an advanced computing center in Holyoke that state officials hope will provide a spark for this long-struggling mill city and the broader Western Massachusetts economy.
The investment seals the tech firms’ partnership with a consortium of five universities, which today will break ground on an $80 million project to redevelop a former mill site into a block-long data center packed with thousands of powerful computers. This computing center will allow researchers to crunch massive amounts of data and tackle complex problems, such as modeling the human immune system.
By itself, the high-performance computing center will create only a couple dozen permanent jobs in Holyoke. But state officials say the participation of EMC and Cisco suggests the center can attract corporate interest and investment that will create additional jobs.
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Boston Capital: Unfamiliar takeover tone
No one is going to mistake Christopher Viehbacher for a man in a hurry.
The chief executive of Sanofi Aventis SA finally pulled the trigger on a hostile $18.5 billion takeover bid for Genzyme Corp., the big Cambridge biotech company he’s been eager to buy since early summer.
This is still big news, even if it fails to qualify as any kind of a surprise. Few Massachusetts companies end up as targets of hostile takeover bids and the scale of this particular offer ranks high among unfriendly merger proposals no matter where they take place.
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