Rumor confirmed: Yukon Pacific is up for sale

Kay Cashman

The rumor about CSX Corp. putting Yukon Pacific Corp. on the market has surfaced again. The last rumor was prompted by a high-level British Petroleum executive having dinner en route to Alaska with the president of CSX outside of Washington, D.C.

This time, the rumor has been confirmed, sans the part about BP’s interest, by Yukon Pacific’s Anchorage executives, Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis.

“You are hearing right. CSX has all of its businesses other than the core business, the railroad, up for sale,” Lowenfels told PNA in an Oct. 9 interview.

“It didn’t just start. This started two or three years back,” Lewis said in the same interview, although the active marketing of Yukon Pacific “just started in the last few weeks.”

“They have sold off the hotels ... they’ve sold off Sea-Land International. They’ve sold off the logistics company, American Barge Lines. So that this is something that they’ve been doing for quite some time and the reason why they’re doing it is because they have been told by Wall Street that they need to concentrate on their core business, which is the railroad,” Lowenfels said.

Has there been any interest in Yukon Pacific?

“Beyond indicating that there’s a great deal of interest, we can’t say anything,” Lowenfels said.

“It’s really just a quirk of timing that they have us being marketed ... at this time,” Lewis said.

“What they’ve been doing, is they’ve been going business by business,” Lowenfels added.