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Kerlin Capital Group LLC Jast week put finishing details on a $60 million sale of privately held Westlake Village-based Apex Therapeutic Care Inc. to publicly held Curative Health Services Inc., a publicly held disease management company based in Minneapolis.

Independent investment banker William "Bill" Doyle, who heads L.A.-based Kerlin, and his managing director, Timothy Fahringer, represented the seller. Doyle last week hinted that the sale price was at a hefty premium, but was coy about estimating the premium in percent terms.

It's hard to measure a premium on deals involving privately held companies such as Apex, because there's no public market for the shares. Nonetheless, Doyle said the Apex transaction was "custom-fitted over the course of a year. Strategic acquisitions and mergers in the current environment can be done at an attractive premium based on combined economics."

Curative paid $19 million in cash, $36 million in stock and $5 million in the form of an IOU for Apex, a provider of drugs and services to hemophiliacs. Apex will be joined with a division of Curative to become the third-largest purveyor of such products in the United States.

Contributing columnist Benjamin Mark Cole writes about the local investment community for the Los Angeles Business Journal. His new book is "The Pied Pipers of Wall Street: How Analysts Sell You Down the River," published by Bloomberg Press. He can be reached at [e-mail].