Anthony J. Gumbiner, Hallwood CEO & Chairman
May 2019
Anthony Gumbiner, an Investment Banker and a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Judicature of England, serves as Founder and Chairman of the Hallwood Family office.
Over the last 40 years, Mr. Gumbiner has served as Chairman and Chief Executive of companies on the London Stock Exchange, The New York Stock Exchange, The American Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
Mr. Gumbiner currently serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of various Hallwood companies, as a Director of BlueCrest Energy Inc, and Damille Investments Limited, a Guernsey closed ended investment company listed on the specialist fund market of the LSE.
Personal Information
Although Mr. Gumbiner was born in England he has been a resident of Monaco for nearly 40 years. He is married with three children, all of whom reside in the US.
After attending an English grammar school, My Gumbiner attended the College of Law in Guildford England and qualified as a Solicitor of the English Supreme Court in 1968 with First Class Honors and distinctions in Company Law and Partnership.
Major Accomplishments
In 1978, Mr. Gumbiner retired from the practice of law to concentrate on developing Hallwood into a financial services company specializing in Corporate Rescue Financing.
Corporate rescue financing involved first using sophisticated research techniques to locate financially distressed, publicly owned corporations, then assisting selected companies with customized restructuring plans before they entered into bankruptcy.
Such plans normally called for negotiations between Hallwood and the client’s creditors to retire burdensome debt for cash at a deep discount and financing this debt retirement by issuing to the client companies shareholders rights to purchase new shares in the restructured company.
To guarantee payments to creditors Hallwood underwrote the rights offering and sub underwrote all or part of the investment to an international network of institutional investors. Typically, the fee for this service was paid with a controlling shareholding in the client company
Mr. Gumbiner’s first restructuring using an underwritten deep discount stockholder rights offering was Bank and Commercial Holdings Limited, a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Mr. Gumbiner successfully refinanced the company and became Chairman and CEO of his first public company in 1978.
In 1979, Mr. Gumbiner took his rights offering technique to the US where it was previously little known or understood and thereafter successfully rescued, inter alia, First Pennsylvania Mortgage Trust, The UMET Trust, (the Union Bank of California Real Estate Investment Trust), the bankrupt Chase Manhattan Realty Trust, and Institutional Investors Trust in New York.
His highest profile restructuring, sold in 1996, was probably Chuck-E-Cheese, a national children’s entertainment restaurant chain listed on the NYSE.
In 2014, Mr. Gumbiner recreated the company as a family office.