Richard Baker, the Prince of Lord & Taylor - NYTimes.com

By Stephanie Clifford and Peter Lattman - from the New York Times

Lord & Taylor's flagship store now includes a section for Hudson's Bay Company products, since Richard A. Baker bought both and merged them. (Photo by Robert Caplin for the New York Times)

SCARSDALE, N.Y.

RICHARD A. BAKER dashes through the Lord & Taylor store here like Willy Wonka on a chocolate high.

Look at these sweaters!

Check out this Ralph Lauren!

Just wait till you see our store in Yonkers!

He squeaks to a stop at a table stacked with derrière enhancers. “How is this doing, Charlie?” he asks the store manager.

Then he surveys his domain: “This building alone could be a $100 million property!”

If Mr. Baker sounds like a rich kid playing with his new toys, well, that’s because he is a rich kid playing with his new toys. Only the toys happen to be two of the oldest department store chains in North America: Lord & Taylor, the grande dame that used to anchor the Ladies’ Mile in Manhattan, and the Hudson’s Bay Company of Canada, which traces its roots back to the 17th-century fur trade.

How Mr. Baker, 45, came to own these baubles is a story for our financial times. He’s not exactly a self-made man. His father, Robert C. Baker, owns a giant shopping mall development company. But in 2006, just before the recession, the younger Mr. Baker took a flier and bought Lord & Taylor, and later the Hudson’s Bay Company, putting down almost no money and borrowing more than $1 billion to finance the deals. Just about everyone in retailing wrote him off. Many whispered that he would get hammered, like several investment hotshots who set their sights on this business.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the comeuppance. It turns out that Mr. Baker wasn’t so bad at running department stores. In 2010, sales at Lord & Taylor’s 46 stores rose 12.2 percent from the previous year, and are now higher than they were before the recession bit. And Hudson Bay’s flagship Bay stores posted their first increase in same-store sales in a decade. Earnings at the combined companies totaled $450 million last year, before taxes, up from $330 million in 2009.

In January, Mr. Baker solved the company’s debt problem, striking a complex deal to sell the rights to leases on an under performing division of the Hudson’s Bay Company to Target for about $1.8 billion. There are discussions about an initial public offering of the combined companies as soon as this fall. Read more...

Richard Baker, the Prince of Lord & Taylor - NYTimes.com

Flying the Flag, Fleeing the State - NYTimes.com

By Rose George - from the New York Times

FOUR American yachters killed; a Danish family of five and two crew members kidnapped: these events in the space of a week early this year may finally fuel a consensus that something needs to be done about piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. And something should be done: in addition to the yachters, nearly 700 sailors, mostly Filipino, Bangladeshi and Russian, are being held hostage. Often forced to operate their captured ships at gunpoint, with little food or water, some of them have been prisoners for months.

But maritime lawlessness isn’t confined to pirates. Thanks to a system of ship registration called “flags of convenience,” it is all too easy for unscrupulous ship owners to get away with criminal behavior. They have evaded prosecution for environmental damage like oil spills, as well as poor labor conditions, forcing crews to work like slaves without adequate pay or rest. But unlike piracy, which seems intractable, the appalling conditions on some merchant ships could be stopped.

Ships used to fly the flags of their nation. They were floating pieces of their home country on ungovernable seas, with all the advantages and disadvantages of government oversight: if things went wrong, seafarers were protected by their governments. If they did wrong, they could be punished.

But in the early 20th century, this began to change. Panama, seeking to attract American ships avoiding Prohibition laws, allowed non-Panamanians to fly its flag, for a fee. Liberia and other countries followed suit. Today these “open registries” are used by over 60 percent of shippers, up from 4 percent in the 1950s.

Under the flags of convenience system, registries have been divorced from government oversight. North Korea has a thriving registry, as does landlocked Mongolia. Liberia’s registry, the second-largest in the world, flourished even during a dozen years of civil war. Some registries allow ship owners to change the flags they’re registered under within 48 hours; some require little more than a signature or an online form from an owner. Many don’t require owners to disclose their identities at all.

Such easy anonymity is dangerous. Read more

Flying the Flag, Fleeing the State - NYTimes.com