Mower, who will start serving a 33-month prison sentence on Nov. 13 for income tax evasion, bought the former corporate headquarters of Little Giant Ladder in Springville for nearly $3.5 million on Friday — as part of his plans for his new company, SupraNaturals LLC.

Incorporated in 2004, SupraNaturals’s corporate headquarters and manufacturing plant will occupy a 332,000-square-foot building at 1356 W. Spring Creek Place in Springville. It is scheduled to open in November.

The Little Giant Ladder office –a 96,000-square-foot building at 1325 W. Industrial Circle that is still occupied by Wing Enterprises, will be converted into additional manufacturing and office space for SupraNaturals once Wing’s lease expires in April 2007, said Ryan Moss, Wing’s CEO. The ladder maker is relocating to a nearby 240,000-square-foot building at 1198 N. Spring Creek Place, which was formerly occupied by local health food manufacturer E. Excel International Inc.

SupraNaturals’s plant

When completed in mid-2007, the SupraNaturals plant will be a private label maker of personal care products including shampoos, conditioners and soap, as well as dietary supplements, bottled water and chewing gum.

“We have contracts with liquid soap customers, and hope eventually to also make dietary supplement capsules. But we won’t have any specific brand or formulas under the SupraNaturals’s name,” said Gary Chlarson, who has served as project manager with the company for past 18 months.

“We acquired the Little Giant Ladder building because of its proximity to our building, which gives us the room to expand,” he said.

While Mower is principal investor and owner of SupraNaturals, he will not be involved in managing the business, nor will his pending prison sentence affect the company, Chlarson said.

“Martha Stewart was still running her business even though she was in prison. I don’t see why it should stop Mower,” Moss said.

SupraNaturals is separately owned and managed from Neways. An executive team is being assembled to run the new Springville company, Chlarson said.

Phase one of the project, which comprises 130,000 square feet of manufacturing space, was completed three months ago, while Phase two, a 65,000-square-foot finished goods warehouse, is scheduled to be completed in two weeks. Construction of a raw-materials warehouse and cosmetics manufacturing plant, which will total 137,000 square feet, is scheduled to start in December.

Twenty-one existing workers moved into the 130,000-square-foot location in July and the company plans to hire up to 150 workers in manufacturing, sales and marketing, machine operations, distribution and logistics, research and development, and administration by year-end. But its long-term employment goal is 450.

Neways not sold

Separately, Neways top executives on Wednesday denied claims in a Reuters news report in Tokyo that the company is being sold. The Reuters story, which ran Sept. 26, cited unnamed sources that claimed Neways is being auctioned in Japan for between $600 million and $700 million, with private equity houses among the bidders.

“We’ve had multiple offers for the past three to five years. But there is no auction and no offer being negotiated,” said Eric Larsen, Neways’s chief executive.

James Watson, vice president of human resources and organizational development for Neways, agreed. “At any given time, five or six companies or investment groups are always knocking at our door. We’re a very profitable and attractive company, with a strong upper management team, and therefore, has been object of interest over the years.”

The Springville-based, privately held company made $750 million in sales last year, and is projected to grow another 5 to 10 percent this year, Larsen said. More than half of Neways’s sales in skin care and nutritional products come from Japan, with the remainder from 23 other countries.

Larsen, who had joined the company as vice president of international operations and development in 2003, was appointed CEO in March after the retirement of former CEO Michael Cunningham.

The impact of Mower’s prison term

Larsen says he doesn’t expect Mower’s upcoming prison sentence to affect the company’s operations.

“Neways is a business entity on its own, entirely separate from the Mowers’ personal tax problems and issues,” he said. “The Mowers have, about five years ago, set up an executive team to handle the company’s day-to-day affairs, with or without their involvement.”

Neways’s management team, under the direction of Larsen and its board of directors, reviews the company’s budgets, product launches, business strategies and other operations.

Neways was founded by Thomas and Leslie DeeAnn Mower, who each own 50 percent of the company.

The Mowers, who divorced in July 2000, will start prison terms on Nov. 13 for failing to pay personal income tax on about $3.2 million, which prosecutors say came from their companies Neways U.S., Neways Australia and Neways Malaysia. They were indicted in 2003.

A federal jury found them guilty last year of six counts of income tax evasion and one count of conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. Mower will spend 33 months in federal prison and serve 36 months of supervised release and pay a fine of more than $75,000. Leslie was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison, a $60,000 fine and 36 months of supervised release.

The former corporate attorney for Neways, James Thompson, was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to defraud the IRS and was sentenced to spend 25 months in prison with 24 months of supervised release.

The tax evasion, which lasted from 1989 to 2002, according to court documents, mounted to a total individual tax loss of about $1.26 million.

Founded in 1992, Neways, which has a total of 1,300 workers companywide, has a manufacturing plant in Salem. Of its 1,300 global work force in 14 countries, 600 are in Utah.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.