Marking the final chapter in the sad saga of a once-proud name which became so sullied by failure that the company finally changed its corporate name to New Valley Corp, what is left of the former Western Union Corp is to be sold to First Data Corp of Hackensack, New Jersey. First Data has made an offer of $480m for substantially all of the assets of Upper Saddle River, New Jersey-based New Valley Corp and its Western Union Financial Services Inc subsidiary, which are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Western Union tarried too long in modernising its systems, and when the facsimile machine knocked the bottom out of its core telex services business, the company went into a terminal decline.
