UPS buys Overnite

UPS Inc., the world’s biggest shipping carrier, is stepping up expansion of its freight delivery business with its $1.25 billion purchase of trucking company Overnite Corp.

The deal announced Monday is UPS’ largest single acquisition, and follows the Atlanta-based company’s decision last week to spend $24 million to build and equip five regional freight hubs at U.S. airports. Overnite shares soared 43 percent; UPS shares also rose.

Shipping heavy freight has been a small percentage of UPS’ overall business, but the company wants to make it a bigger emphasis.

Wichita

Machinists to vote on Boeing sale

The Boeing Co.’s largest union in Wichita will decide next week whether to accept pay and benefit cuts in exchange for a chance at a job and a possible slice of the new company formed by a Canadian investment firm’s purchase of the aerospace giant’s commercial facilities.

At stake in the vote’s outcome may be the fate of the deal struck by Boeing to sell its Kansas and Oklahoma commercial aircraft operations to Onex Corp.

The newly formed company, Mid-Western Aircraft Systems, would offer jobs to between 4,000 and 4,500 of the 6,000 employees at Boeing’s Wichita plant represented by the machinists union, said Garland Moore, a union representative.

Onex has told union officials that the company would drop the sale if it could not secure union support, Moore said. The union vote is May 24.

Lawsuit

Morgan Stanley to pay $604.3 million

Billionaire financier Ron Perelman won $604.3 million in compensatory damages Monday in a lawsuit accusing the investment firm Morgan Stanley of duping him about a takeover deal.

The jury found that Perelman, chief of Revlon cosmetics, relied on false statements that Sunbeam Corp. was a turnaround success and could afford to acquire his camping equipment company, Coleman.