THE rum giant Bacardi is weighing up a multi-billion-pound stock-market flotation that would end 144 years of family control.

Bacardi executives have recently spoken to several Wall Street banks and are said to be considering a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

Both Bacardi and Merrill Lynch, one of the banks said to have been visited by the drinks group, declined to comment.

Bacardi is the world’s largest privately held drinks company, selling more than 200m bottles a year. As well as the eponymous rum, Bacardi owns Bombay Sapphire gin, Grey Goose vodka, Dewar’s whisky and Martini & Rossi.

It has tried and failed to go public in the past after disputes between family members about the direction of the company. Bacardi is owned by about 600 descendants of its Cuban founder Facundo Bacardi y Masso.

Family members have fought fiercely in the past, disinheriting wives and turning daughter against mother. The issue of a stock-market flotation is a fractious one at the tightly controlled company.

Last year it hired an outsider as chief executive, Andreas Gembler, a former Philip Morris executive. Gembler has since appointed another outsider, John Esposito, former president and chief executive of Moet Hennessy USA, to head up Bacardi’s American business. He replaced Eduardo Sardina, who had run the US business for more than 10 years. Sardina’s wife, Anne, is the great-great-granddaughter of the founder.

Family members now believe Bacardi needs to raise money to compete with its larger rivals. Drinks analysts have seen the outside appointments as the first step in that process.

The drinks industry has been consolidating rapidly since Diageo was created from the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan in 1997. In 2001 Seagram, the Bronfman family’s whiskey business, was sold to Diageo and Pernod. Last year Allied Domecq was taken over by Pernod Ricard.

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