January 23, 2002
		Huntingdon Life Sciences Financial Backer Bails Out Animal experimentation giant Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) announced that its biggest financial backer, Stephens Group, is ending its partnership with the company. Stephens, which is HLS's largest shareholder as well as its only debt provider, bailed HLS out after the Royal Bank of Scotland pulled its lending facility from the company. A spokesman for the Arkansas-based Stephens said that the decision was not due to the intense scrutiny and pressure of anti-vivisection activists. Huntingdon tests on dogs, monkeys, pigs, rats and mice. "This doesn't have anything to do with the protests in the last few weeks," the spokesman said. "It is a good deal for HLS and us." The debt has been bought by a buyer whose identity has been shrouded in secrecy. A spokesman for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which has been the primary organization that has actively protested Huntingdon, hailed the broken partnership as "an immense victory." "We will find out who the new backer is and we will campaign against them in the same way as we did against Stephens," the spokesman said. "We were never supposed to find out that Stephens were backing HLS, but we did." HLS director Andrew Gay maintained that the future of the company was stable. "We are quite supportive of Stephens' decision," he said. "The HLS campaign has been very much focused on them, and they have been enormously supportive to us."