NYSE chair denies report of board changes

John S. Reed, temporarily leading the New York Stock Exchange, said on his first day on the job Monday that the exchange should be overhauled before the makeup of its board is changed.

Reed, who was meeting with Securities and Exchange Commission chairman William Donaldson, denied a news report that he was expected to try to remove Wall Street chief executives from the board to reduce potential conflicts of interest.

Reed is pictured above left with Donaldson.

“I have given no thought to the composition of the board,” Reed said. He said the news report “has zero foundation from me.”

Reed recently suggested that the 27-seat board be pared down to about a dozen members. He said Monday he nonetheless rejected “this idea that we should simply throw out everyone on the board who’s from the financial community.”

Agriculture

Farmland reaches deal to sell Coffeyville plant

Bankrupt Farmland Industries has signed a $281 million deal to sell its Coffeyville oil refinery and nitrogen fertilizer plant.

The bankrupt agriculture cooperative struck the tentative deal Monday with a subsidiary of Pegasus Partners II, a Connecticut-based investment firm.

Pegasus officials said they intended to make additional investments to improve the plant’s productivity once the deal was complete.

The deal is subject to bankruptcy court approval and other potential buyers will be allowed to make bids on the property.

Farmland still owns a vacant nitrogen fertilizer plant in Lawrence. The facility is for sale but the company has not found a buyer.

Wall Street

Walgreen earnings rise

Profits jumped 12 percent at Walgreen Co. in the fourth quarter as the nation’s largest drugstore chain benefited from a recovery in general merchandise sales to buttress still-booming prescription drug sales.

Net earnings were $277.1 million, or 27 cents a share, compared with $247.7 million, or 24 cents a share, for the same period a year earlier. That matched the consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call. Revenues for the three-month period ended Aug. 31 were $8.25 billion, a 14 percent increase from $7.24 billion.

Investigation

Enron probe seeks documents from Lay

The Securities and Exchange Commission asked a federal judge Monday to force former Enron Corp. chairman Kenneth L. Lay to turn over documents sought for an SEC investigation of the bankrupt Houston energy company.

The SEC said Lay was wrong to contend that surrendering the documents would violate his constitutional right against self-incrimination.

The agency asked U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington to order Lay to produce the documents so that the judge could determine whether they were, as the SEC contends, corporate documents and not personal papers.