New York Times, BY Petter Lattman and Michael De La Merced:
A multibillion-dollar takeover battle broke out last week over a Houston company that owns 20,000 miles of natural gas pipelines running from the southeastern tip of Florida to the Oklahoma Panhandle.
The man at the center of the fight is a New York billionaire who runs the energy business from offices on the top floor of the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park.
George L. Lindemann has quietly amassed a fortune over a five-decade career of buying and selling disparate businesses, like contact lenses and cellphone licenses. Now, the 74-year-old investor has been thrust into the middle of a tug-of-war over Southern Union, the natural gas company he has controlled since 1990.
“Unlike the high-profile hedge fund and private equityguys, he’s more of a throwback, an old-school, publicity-averse deal maker,” said Peter Newcomb, a longtime editor of the Forbes 400, the annual list of the wealthiest Americans, on which Mr. Lindemann routinely appears. “Despite his extraordinary success he tends to fly beneath the radar.”
That has been, in part, because operating a pipeline has historically been a sleepy affair. But in recent years natural gas has experienced a boom as new exploration fields have been discovered in places like the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas and the Haynesville Shale near Shreveport, La.