Michael D. Dingman

Michael David Dingman (b.1931- d.2017)

Born in New Haven, CT in 1931, he attended the University of Maryland, leaving before graduation, in 1995, Dingman left America for opportunities outside America, where government rules and laws would interfere in pursuit of greater lucrative business opportunities.

A Bahamian private equity group, bypasses encumbrances of the US Federal rules and disclosures.

The Shiptons Group, Ltd. was largely rewarded and successful.

Their gifts in philanthropy was shared amongst the organizations whereby shared interests of public funded organizations, outside the profitable international investment portfolios and the groups many successes.

Dingman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 29, 1931.

Following his early education at The Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey, Dingman enrolled at the University of Maryland, joining the Theta Chi fraternity.

At the age of 20, he left the university prior to graduating to work for the Wall Street investment firm Burnham & Company.

Dingman became a Burnham partner in 1970 and was assigned to the initial public stock offering (IPO) of the predecessor of Temple-Inland Inc.

While at Burnham, he also became president and chief executive officer of Equity Corp.

He combined its Wheelabrator industrial-cleaning and air-pollution-control units with Frye Copysystems, a manufacturer of printing inks and carbon paper, to create Wheelabrator-Frye Inc.

Dingman became chief executive officer of the new company, a position he held until 1983, when Wheelabrator was acquired by The Signal Companies, an aerospace and industrial firm based in La Jolla, Calif. Dingman then became Signal's president.

Allied Corporation and Signal merged in 1985, and in 1986, 35 units of the combined company were spun off as The Henley Group, headed by Dingman.

He built on the most profitable of these companies and sold the rest.

Henley's IPO raised $1.2 billion.

Dingman was known to be a wheeler-dealer operator who ran Henley Group in a manner that benefited him more than his shareholders.

Henley's Wheelabrator Technologies (now a unit of Waste Management, Inc.) was a leading company in the waste-to-energy market.

Beginning in the 1990s, Dingman expanded investments internationally, beginning in the Czech Republic.

Under the umbrella of paper giant Stratton Company which he headed, Dingman invested $100 million of his own money into newly privatized utilities and other companies.

He then invested in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet bloc.

In Russia, Shipston joined a consortium investing in OAO SIDANCO, Russia's 5th largest oil & gas company and Rusia Petroleum, the developer of the Kovyktinskaya gas condensate field.

Shipston later sold its interest in OAO SIDANCO to British Petroleum and Tyumen Oil Company (TNK).

Dingman was also a major shareholder in Segezha Pulp and Paper, later sold to AssiDoman AB, a Swedish company.

Other activities ranged from property investments to the Russian water company Saint Springs, later sold to Nestle.

Dingman and Shipston also became the founding venture investors in Renaissance Capital, one of Russia’s leading investment companies.

Shipston was also a member of an investment consortium that acquired a minority interest in the telecom OAO Svyazinvest.

Shipston later heavily invested in mainland China, focusing on its internal growth and consumption, and continued to invest in a range of industries.

With offices in Nanjing and Beijing, the company acquired a portfolio of businesses in education (primary, secondary and trade schools), medical technologies and heavy industry.

Among the Chinese companies in which Shipston had a vested interest were Genscript Holdings, a multinational biotech and pharmaceuticals company, and Hubei Modern Balloch Development Co., a large real-estate development firm.

Dingman was a director of Ford Motor Company (21 years), and of Time Inc. and then Time Warner Inc.

(24 years), and served as a director of Mellon Bank Corporation, Temple Industries Inc., Temple-Inland Inc., Continental Telephone Company and Teekay Shipping Corporation.

Michael Dingman and his wife, Elizabeth Tharp Dingman, rebuilt the Lyford Cay School near their home in the Bahamas, where their children attended.

Fisher Scientific International Inc. completed more than 60 acquisitions after becoming a public company in 1991.

He left his birthland, and in 1995, Dingman became a new Bahamian citizen.

Shipstons Group Ltd., established in Nassau, Bahamas, home to the new Shipstons international investors group.

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It merged with Thermo Electron Corporation in 2006.

Now doing business as Thermo Fisher Scientific, the company reported 2009 revenues of more than $10 billion.

Michael D. Dingman, President and CEO of Shipston Group Ltd., based in Nassau, Bahamas, and was the President and CEO of the private international investment group at time of his death at age 86 in 2017.

He recognized his American citizenship would require factors the limited group in the US would want disclosures the preferred business practice didn't agree.