General SPAC
February 3, 2021
5 minutes read

Ex-US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Forms SPAC

The latest renowned individual to join the SPAC boom is Wilbur Ross, a businessman and private equity mogul who served…

The latest renowned individual to join the SPAC boom is Wilbur Ross, a businessman and private equity mogul who served as the United States Secretary of Commerce for the four years of the just-concluded Trump administration. Barely two weeks after leaving office, Ross has formed a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that’s seeking to raise up to $345 million from investors.

Wilbur Ross’s SPAC is eponymously named Ross Acquisition Corp II. In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it indicates that it’s seeking to raise up to $345 million by selling 34.5 million share units at $10 each.

Ross Acquisition plans to hold an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange and trade under the ticker symbol “ROSS.U” The investment bank BofA Securities is the underwriter for its public offering.

In its filing, Ross Acquisition indicates that it intends to find a merger target business with either all or a significant portion of its activities in North America, Europe, or Asia. No specification of the industry that it’ll target was given.

With his SPAC, Ross now counts among the handful of former American public officials that have gotten involved in SPACs. Others in that cohort include Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives, and Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who served as the chief economic advisor to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018.

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