Gleacher & Company, the troubled investment bank that had tried unsuccessfully to sell itself, announced on Thursday that it planned to liquidate its assets, closing up shop after 24 years.
The bank, which was founded by the longtime Wall Street deal maker Eric Gleacher, who left it last year, said its board had unanimously decided that it was in the best interest of shareholders to dissolve and liquidate the company. The decision could spell the end of the boutique firm, which struggled since the financial crisis and has not reported an annual profit since 2009.
Though the board pursued other options, “the process to date has not yielded any opportunities viewed by the board as reasonably likely to provide greater realizable value to stockholders than the complete dissolution and liquidation of the company,†Mark Patterson, the chairman, said in a statement.
Separately, Gleacher said on Thursday that it had suffered a net loss of $2.9 million, or 47 cents a share, in the fourth quarter of 2013. That was narrower than the $11.3 million loss it reported a year earlier.
Shares of the bank, listed on the Nasdaq, fell more than 2 percent on Thursday morning to a little above $11. The dissolution proposal is subject to a shareholder vote at the annual meeting on May 29.
If the liquidation proposal is approved, the company plans to sell its assets and return the cash to shareholders, after paying expenses and setting aside reserves to cover any future claims.
The initial distribution to shareholders is expected to be about $20 million, or $3.23 a share, the company said. That could rise to a total of $60 million to $90 million, or $9.70 to $14.55 a share, if a portion of the reserves is ultimately distributed to shareholders.
The plan outlines a final chapter for a bank founded by one of the star deal makers of the 1980s. Gleacher & Company, which provided advice for mergers and acquisitions and other transactions, never managed to recover from the financial crisis, even as other small investment banks won business by pitching the simplicity of their business model compared with the Wall Street giants.
Mr. Gleacher, a banker at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley who participated in the fight over RJR Nabisco, started the bank in 1990. He sold it in 1995 to National Westminster Bank, but then took it private four years later. In 2009, amid a slump on Wall Street, the bank was acquired by the brokerage firm Broadpoint Securities, which adopted the Gleacher name.
With mounting losses, the bank announced in 2012 that it was exploring a sale. But no buyers materialized. Mr. Gleacher, the chairman at the time, departed the firm early last year.
Then, last June, Gleacher & Company announced that it was shutting down its investment banking business. It named a restructuring expert as its chief executive, portending tough decisions ahead.
