Michael D. Dingman

Michael David Dingman (September 29, 1931 – October 3, 2017) was an international investor, businessman and philanthropist. He was President of Shipston Group Ltd., a private equity company based in Nassau, Bahamas.

Early life 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.

Career 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.

In 1972, Dingman combined Wheelabrator industrial-cleaning and air-pollution-control units with Frye Copysystems, a manufacturer of printing inks and carbon paper, to create Wheelabrator-Frye Inc. He 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.

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

Investments Starting in the 1990s, Dingman expanded investments internationally, beginning in the Czech Republic. In partnership with Czech criminal financier Viktor Kožený and 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.

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.

Philanthropy Michael Dingman and his wife, Elizabeth Tharp Dingman, rebuilt the Lyford Cay School near their home in the Bahamas, where their children attended. Together, over a number of years, they doubled its class size and helped it attain international accreditation.

In 1989, Dingman endowed the eponymous Michael D. Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, the school he attended.

He is a benefactor and former trustee of the John A. Hartford Foundation and of Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Personal life In 1995, Dingman renounced U.S. citizenship to become a citizen of the Bahamas.

Dingman died on October 3, 2017, at his home in Lyford Cay. He was survived by his wife Elizabeth, their three children, and three other children from a previous marriage.

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