Lazard May Be Step Closer to IPO

Privately held investment banking giant Lazard may be moving closer to joining the ranks of publicly traded companies, sources say.

Bruce Wasserstein, the firm’s chief, this week will lay out plans to take Lazard public in a transaction that would value the company at about $3 billion, people familiar with the matter said Monday.

Lazard’s working partners, who own 64% of the firm, will be told how their stakes would be converted into shares in an initial public offering and how long they would have to wait before cashing out, said the people, who declined to be identified.

Lazard, run from New York, Paris and London, would be the largest investment banking partnership to go public since Goldman Sachs Group Inc. sold shares in 1999.

Wasserstein, 56, is pursuing a stock offering as equity markets stagnate. A share sale would give Lazard, founded by the family of Chairman Michel David-Weill in 1848, more capital to underwrite securities and reward bankers.

Wasserstein is nearing an agreement to buy out David-Weill, 71, to gain his backing for an IPO, the people said.

“It’s going to be hard for the boutique firms to land the big important deals without the capital they need from an IPO,” said Mike Ford-Taggart, an investment banking analyst at Morningstar Inc., a Chicago-based research firm. “Nobody understands the market as well as Bruce Wasserstein.”

Lazard may file IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission next month, and a sale is possible as early as 2005, the people said. Lazard has hired Goldman Sachs to advise on the IPO plans, they said.

Lazard spokesman Richard Silverman declined to comment. David-Weill wasn’t immediately available for comment.

David-Weill hired Wasserstein almost three years ago to revive the firm after bankers such as Steven Rattner, Felix Rohatyn and Ken Wilson left in the late 1990s.

One of Wall Street’s pioneers in offering merger advice, Wasserstein in 2000 sold his majority-owned Wasserstein, Perella & Co. to Dresdner Bank of Germany for $1.6 billion.