If all goes as planned, contract research organization (CRO) Quintiles Transnational will have a new mix of owners come January.

On Dec. 21, the company announced that one investor is selling its ownership stake, while two others are staying around, and two new investors are coming on board. The amount of each stake was not released.

OEP Selling

One Equity Partners (OEP), the private equity arm of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) is out. This is the company with which Quintiles Chairman and CEO Dennis Gillings led the original acquisition of Quintiles, along with TPG Capital, in 2003.

TPG is staying onboard, as is Temasek Holdings, the Singapore government’s sovereign wealth fund. New investors are Bain Capital and 3i.

No Debt

The company, which is based in Durham, N.C., said it is incurring no new debt as a result of the deal.

Quintiles spokesperson Pat Grebe said the company cannot divulge any more information about the impending change beyond what’s in the company press release. She did add that Quintiles’ revenues will top $2 billion this year. The company has 20,000 employees, making it by far the biggest CRO in the market.

Not A Buy Out

Grebe called a New York Times story on the ownership changes “very misleading,” saying that the paper made it sound like there would be two equity partners buying the company. Grebe instead characterized the shift as a new partnership between Gillings, two established investors and two new ones.

Quintiles was formed in 1982 by Gillings, then a professor of biostatistics. It went public in 1994, then private again in 2003. Quintiles’ stock value was slashed nearly in half in the stock market decline of the early 2000’s. Gillings offered to buy the firm for $1.3 billion in 2002, but was rejected. He and the group including One Equity later won an auction with a bid of $1.7 billion.

In a December 27, 2007 story, the Wall Street Journal suggested that Bain, 3i and the Quintiles management (perhaps just Gillings?) all have equal positions that add up to more than half of the company’s equity. “Bain, 3i and the company’s management, led by Dennis B. Gillings, have bought equal stakes making up a majority of the company’s ownership, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the paper reported. ClinPage hopes to have more details soon. But since Quintiles is a private company, there is much about the recent deal that may never be released.

—by