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Private-equity firm Apollo Global Management’s acquisition offer values crafts retailer at $3.3 billion

Arts and crafts retailer Michaels MIK +22.86% Cos. is going private in a deal that values the company at more than $3 billion.

Private-equity firm Apollo Global Management Inc. APO +1.06% is buying the retailer in a deal valuing Michaels at $3.3 billion. Apollo will offer to buy Michaels’s outstanding shares for $22 a share as part of the deal. The companies said the offer is a 47% premium to where shares closed Feb. 26, the day before there was deal speculation.

Shares Wednesday were up 22% to $22.05 a share.

Michaels Chairman James Quella said in prepared remarks that the board “firmly believes Apollo’s offer represents a compelling value to our shareholders.” The companies valued the transaction at $5.0 billion.

Apollo and Michaels said the deal agreement allows for a 25-day “go-shop” period where Michaels will look at other options, but there is no assurance that process will lead to a better offer.

The painting, “Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque,” was a gift to Jolie by Brad Pitt and is believed to be Churchill’s only World War II-era landscape.

LONDON — A painting first owned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and now being sold by the actress Angelina Jolie, elevated the art of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to a new price league at auction at Christie’s on Monday.

The work, “Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque” (1943), sold for 8.3 million pounds, or about $11.5 million, with fees — a record for an artwork by Churchill, who was a keen amateur painter.

Churchill gave his Impressionist-style painting of a sunlit Marrakesh with the Atlas Mountains in the background to Roosevelt in 1943, as a birthday gift, after a pivotal World War II meeting in Casablanca to discuss long-term strategy. Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to stay on an extra day in North Africa. Marrakesh was a much-loved subject for paintings by Churchill.

“You cannot come all this way to North Africa without seeing Marrakesh,” Churchill told the president, according to the Christie’s catalog. “I must be with you when you see the sun set on the Atlas Mountains.” Believed to be Churchill’s only landscape painted during the war years, the work records the view the two statesmen enjoyed at the Villa Taylor, on the outskirts of the city.

More recently, in 2011, the painting had been bought by Brad Pitt for $2.95 million from the New Orleans antiques dealer M.S. Rau, and gifted to Jolie. The celebrity couple married in 2014, but began divorce proceedings in 2016. Christie’s catalog listed the work as “property of the Jolie Family Collection.”

The work proved to be the star lot of Christie’s evening auction of Modern British Art in London. Estimated to sell for about $2.09 million to $3.49 million, it was acquired by an undisclosed telephone buyer. The same telephone buyer bought two other Churchill paintings in the sale, including the landscape “Scene at Marrakech,” dating from about 1935, for $2.6 million.

The previous auction high for a painting by Churchill had been $2.75 million in 2014, for “The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell,” dating from 1932, showing the garden of the politician’s country home in Kent.

“Academics have always looked on him as a Sunday painter, but there’s always been a following for him, especially in America,” said Alan Hobart, director of the London-based Pyms Gallery, who mentioned an exhibition devoted to Churchill’s paintings held at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1958. “But this was Roosevelt, Hollywood and Churchill. It had everything going for it.”

Articles by Churchill on “Painting as a Pastime” appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1921 and 1922. According to the International Churchill Society, this journalism netted the politician the “handsome” sum of £1,000, or about $66,700 in today’s money, “considerably more than his paintings would earn him in his lifetime.”

The future of gun control may be at stake.

A new front in the gun control fight

Federal laws have protected gun makers from liability from gun crimes and deaths. But officials in New Jersey are taking a novel approach to investigating the industry that hasn’t drawn much attention, Andrew writes in his latest column: They’re going after Smith & Wesson, one of the biggest manufacturers, over its advertising practices.

New Jersey has taken aim at Smith & Wesson’s marketing, in what it describes as a “garden-variety” investigation by the state’s consumer affairs division. At issue are ads like a TV commercial that shows a woman carrying a pistol in a handbag everywhere she goes, from the office to the gym. But nearly everything in that ad is illegal in most states if she didn’t have a concealed carry permit. New Jersey said it’s investigating potential advertising fraud.

The real aim is to unearth internal documents from Smith & Wesson, with the goal of exposing the industry’s workings. Gun manufacturers have been able to resist previous legal fights for such material, including by filing for bankruptcy.

Smith & Wesson’s response: The investigation “seeks to suppress and punish lawful speech regarding gun ownership in order to advance an anti-Second Amendment agenda that the attorney general publicly committed to pursue,” the company argued in a lawsuit to prevent New Jersey from enforcing its subpoena for documents. The company adds that its advertising is protected by the Second Amendment and a federal law meant to shield the gun industry from frivolous lawsuits.

But there’s an exception: The law excludes “an action in which a manufacturer or seller of a qualified product knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.” In other words, investigating advertising is fair game.

The big takeaway, according to Andrew: This might be the case that finally produces the sort of exposures that helped turn the tide against tobacco companies in the 1990s. “When the industry in question has long felt protected by special laws,” he writes, “it’s possible that the material could be particularly revealing.”

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