Financial Times 22-10-2001 

Huntingdon loses another shareholder

By Patrick Jenkins in London

One of the biggest shareholders in Huntingdon Life Sciences, the UK animal 
testing company, is selling its 8.02 per cent stake. 

Oracle Partners, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, said it had begun to sell 
out of HLS and was likely to sell the rest of its stake over the coming weeks. 

Animal rights protests and HLS's share price performance had motivated the sale, 
Oracle said. Larry Feinberg, president, said: "My staff have been threatened by 
these terrorists and I have to take account of that." 

HLS said the loss of Oracle as a shareholder was "unfortunate and inevitable" in 
the light of heightened protestor activity, but stressed private investors were 
picking up the divested holdings. It follows sales by UK institutional shareholders, 
including Merrill Lynch, Barclays, HSBC, CSFB, Philips & Drew and WestLB Panmure. 

Oracle was HLS's third-largest shareholder after Quilcap, another US hedge fund, 
which has a 10 per cent stake, and Stephens Group, the company's banker which 
holds 15.65 per cent. 

Stephens, a shareholder since 1998, came to HLS's rescue with a £22m ($31.5m) credit 
line in January, when the animal tester's UK banker, Royal Bank of Scotland, opted 
not to renew a £24m overdraft facility. 

Despite continued protestor pressure on Stephens, co-ordinated by Stop Huntingdon 
Animal Cruelty, and the pressure group's vow in January to "wage war on Stephens", 
the group has stood firm. 

In July, it committed a further £2m of loans to HLS. 

Quilcap is equally unmoved. "We have received a lot of harassment, but it hasn't 
changed our position," it said last week. 

Recent protests in the US has followed HLS's decision this month to restructure 
under a new Maryland-based shell company, Life Sciences Research (LSR), by the 
end of the year. 

HLS plans to delist its shares in the UK and switch its American depository 
receipt listing on Nasdaq's over-the-counter bulletin board market to an OTCBB 
listing for the new LSR shares. 

LSR is raising $1.5m of fresh capital, with subscription fronted by Walter Stapfer, 
a Swiss accountancy firm boss who is buying a tenth of the new shares himself. 

A handful of other European investors are understood to have subscribed to the 
remainder of the capital raising. 

HLS said one of the benefits of relocating to the US was the protection it would 
afford shareholders. Under Maryland law, investors with less than a 5 per cent 
stake remain anonymous, while shareholders with bigger stakes are only disclosed 
to other large shareholders.