Business Roundup

Lanxess has sold iSL-Chemie, which makes color pastes and specialty coatings for plastics, to Swiss specialty coatings company Berlac, for about $24 million. iSL, part of Lanxess' Rhein Chemie unit, has annual sales of about $30 million.

Synthetech CEO M. (Sreeni) Sreenivasan will retire on March 31, 2006, after more than 18 years with the company. Philip Ottiger, a fine chemicals industry executive most recently with Bachem California, will succeed him.

BASF will acquire the North American engineering plastics business of Italy's LATI Industria Termoplastici. Annual sales are in the "low-double-digit million-dollar" range. BASF is getting customer lists for nylon, polybutylene terephthalate, and acetal.

OxyVinyls is closing a polyvinyl chloride plant in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, by the end of January, a local report says. The closure of a nearby Dow Chemical vinyl chloride plant is leaving the PVC unit without raw materials. Dow Corning has been awarded a $3.6 million contract from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to develop semiconductor silicon carbide materials technology.

Inamed has agreed to a $3.2 billion acquisition bid by Allergan that trumps an earlier $2.8 billion offer from Medicis. Medicis, which has threatened to exercise the option of hitting Inamed with a $90 million termination fee, says it is evaluating its alternatives.

Bayer and its spin-off Lanxess will set aside funds to pay for civil settlements of suits for fixing synthetic rubber prices. Bayer will take a fourth-quarter charge against earnings of $321 million, while Lanxess will take a $71 million charge.

The Commercial Development & Marketing Association has named Peter Young, president of investment banking firm Young & Partners, as the winner of its Award for Executive Excellence. Young will receive the award at the group's meeting in Philadelphia on April 18.