JMC Steel, a company that moved to Beachwood a few years ago, is considering a move to Chicago, thanks to nearly $4 million in tax breaks.
JMC Steel may be moving its headquarters from Beachwood to Chicago. The company already has offices in Illinois and is being offered nearly $4 million in tax breaks.BEACHWOOD, Ohio -- Beachwood-based JMC Steel Group reportedly is considering moving its 50-job headquarters to Chicago, thanks to nearly $4 million in tax incentives.
JMC already has received $2 million in assistance offers from the state of Illinois, and it has requested another $1.2 million from the city, the Chicago Tribune reported. A city board approved the additional incentives Tuesday, but Chicago's city council still must approve the deal.
In addition to those two sets of tax breaks, the city would forgive an early $600,000 grant of tax funds given to JMC subsidiary Atlas Tube in 2003. The subsidiary failed to meet employment requirements on that project and would have to repay some of those funds if the city did not agree to the new awards.
According to the Tribune, the state and local tax incentives would allow JMC to merge its Beachwood offices and its Atlas Tube sales and management offices in Chicago into one location.
Formerly called John Maneely Steel, JMC was the creation of the Carlyle Group private equity company. Carlyle, in 2006 bought Canada-based Atlas Tube and Sharon, Penn.-based Wheatland Tube and merged the companies. It later added Picoma, a steel tube maker in Cambridge, Ohio, about 60 miles south of Canton.
Calls to the Carlyle Group and JMC Chief Executive Frank Riddick were not returned Wednesday.
The company moved its headquarters to Beachwood from New Jersey in 2007 or 2008. Officials with Carlyle did not respond to questions about when the company moved. In an interview in 2008, JMC officials said they moved to the Cleveland area because it was a more central location to the company's plants in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and the Windsor, Ontario area.
In 2008 Carlyle agreed to sell JMC to Russia's Novolipetsk Steel for $3.5 billion. That deal fell apart later that year when the global economy collapsed.
Carlyle did eventually sell the majority of its stake in Maneely in February, to Canada's Zekelman family, the people who sold Atlas to Carlyle in 2006. The sides did not disclose terms of the deal, but the Zekelman family borrowed $1.1 billion to fund some portion of it.