ChemFirst Fully Resumes Aniline Production at Pascagoula
Acquisition by DuPont Expected to be Completed this Week
ChemFirst Inc. announced that the #1 aniline plant at its Pascagoula, Mississippi facility has re-started and is currently running at its fully rated capacity of 100 million pounds annually. As previously announced, an explosion on October 13, 2002 in the facility's nitrotoluene isomer separation unit had shut down operations at the entire plant site. The facility's #2 aniline plant was re-started the week before last and by early last week had resumed production at its fully rated capacity of 165 million pounds annually. The company's nitrotoluene isomer separation unit remains out of service and it remains the focus of an incident investigation. ChemFirst is pursuing recovery of costs related to the October 13 explosion under its property, business interruption and liability insurance coverage, subject to policy deductibles. Site cleanup is proceeding on a timely basis, and with the cooperation of its customers the company is currently meeting demand for all products affected by the outage.
ChemFirst also announced today that ChemFirst and DuPont are now proceeding to complete on Wednesday, November 6, 2002 DuPont's acquisition of ChemFirst, pursuant to the terms of their July 23, 2002 merger agreement. As a result of the acquisition, ChemFirst shareholders will receive $29.20 per share in cash for their ChemFirst stock. ChemFirst's shareholders approved the merger agreement on October 16, 2002.
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