Decline
Zapata, under Robert Gow's direction, sought to acquire a controlling interest in the United Fruit Company in 1969, but was outbid by AMK Corp. Robert's father, Ralph Gow, was on United Fruit's board of directors.
Gow apparently left Zapata in 1970. He took with him from Zapata Peter C. Knudtzon. Ties to the Bush family continued. In 1971, both Jeb Bush and George W. Bush worked for Gow's new company, Stratford of Texas (also known as Stratford of Houston). Stratford imported tropical plants. According to Knudtzon, George W. Bush reportedly flew for Stratford to Florida and Guatemala. Stratford evidently had ties to a large commercial plantation in La Democracia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala.
In the 1970s, under chairman and CEO William Flynn, Zapata expanded its business to include subsidiaries in dredging, construction, coal mining, copper mining and fishing.
By the late 1970s, saddled with weak operations, high debt and low return on investment, the company again began undergoing changes in management and direction. Led by John Mackin, who succeeded William Flynn, the company began selling off some of those businesses and refocused on offshore oil and gas exploration and production.
In 1982, chief operating officer Ronald Lassiter assumed the role of CEO, and presided over a decade of loss-making brought on by the collapse of oil prices. In 1982, Zapata Off-shore became Zapata Corporation. Its stock performed poorly. By 1986, Zapata was one of the bad loans that shook the foundations of San Francisco-based Bank of America, with a debt of more than $500 million and a fiscal year loss of $250 million. The company announced several restructurings during those years and managed to stave off bankruptcy, but continued to incur major losses. In 1990 the oil drilling company proposed selling its entire fleet of offshore drilling rigs to focus solely on fishing. The company had not had a profitable quarter in more than five years.
In 1990, Zapata Offshore sold 12 of its drilling rigs to Arethusa Offshore, which a few years later merged with Diamond Offshore. Still struggling with debt by 1993, Zapata signed a deal with Norex America to raise more than $100 million through a loan and stock sale. But financier Malcolm Glazer, owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL franchise and at the time owner of 40 percent of Zapata, did not want his holdings diluted and filed a lawsuit to block the deal.
Read more about this topic: Zapata Corporation
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)