“We will retain a financial advisor to design and execute a process to sell our interests in Freedom Group, and we will then return that capital to our investors,” the firm said in a statement. “We believe that this decision allows us to meet our obligations to the investors whose interests we are entrusted to protect without being drawn into the national debate that is more properly pursued by those with the formal charter and public responsibility to do so.”
Public pressure had been building on Cerberus since yesterday, when several media outlets (including us) wrote about the firm’s ownership of the Freedom Group, which it built in 2007 and used as a vehicle to acquire a lot of smaller arms manufacturers. Eliot Spitzer, writing in Slate, urged, “Every student at a university should ask the university if it is invested in Cerberus. Every member of a union should ask their pension-fund managers if they are invested.”
Cerberus will almost certainly lose money — and probably a lot of it — by selling the Freedom Group now. The stocks of major gun companies are all trading well below their 30-day averages as a result of the massacre in Newtown and the growing fear among investors about new, restrictive laws prohibiting certain kinds of gun sales. And it’s tough to imagine an American buyer wanting to make an offer for the company while the massacre is still in the news.
But the firm has very good reasons to sell now. For one, as we reported yesterday, some of Cerberus’s investors are public pension funds, including teachers’ funds like the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, and the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System. At least one of those investors (CalSTRS) said it was reviewing its Cerberus investment in light of the Newtown tragedy.