Hawaii Land & Farming
to sell majority stake

By Russ Lynch
Star-Bulletin

Majority owners of Hawaii Land & Farming Co. have agreed to sell control of the company to Hawaii developer Stanford S. Carr for an initial investment of $1.5 million.

If the deal goes through, he will gain a home-building and land development company that owns 2,700 acres of land on Maui, Kauai and the Big Island.

However, it also has loans of about $20.5 million due in June and suffered heavy losses last year. A group of holders of Class B shares said they agreed to sell 3 million shares of those shares to Carr's Hawaii-registered Milwaukee Holdings LLC.

The purchase will give Carr the equivalent of 9 million votes, since each Class B share is worth three votes of the publicly traded stock, the Class A common shares.

There are about 4.3 million Class B shares outstanding, equal to 12.9 million votes, and 4 million Class A shares, worth one vote each.

The Class A shares were delisted by the Nasdaq exchange in December, after falling below Nasdaq's minimum market-value requirement. They still trade on the OTC bulletin board and last changed hands Thursday, at 31 cents.

Carr has said he will make a tender offer of at least 50 cents a share for the rest of both classes of stock. At that price, he would pay another $2 million for 100 percent ownership.