Kraft’s Irene Rosenfeld a fruit & nut case?
January 19th, 2010
Kraft boss Irene Rosenfeld (pictured above) has been a bit of a chump in splashing out £11.5bn on UK confectioner Cadbury’s. Writing in the Daily Telegraph in a piece on why most takeovers fail, Jeremy Warner has predicted the deal will probably end up ruining both companies.
As usual, the only real beneficiaries will be the fee-hungry investment bankers who talk up such deals, deceiving vainglorious managements into believing that they will be in shareholders’ interests. Invariably, they aren’t.
Just look at RBS’s acquisition of a ABN Amro in 2007. And the way in which Andrea Orcel and Matthew Greenburgh of Merrill Lynch sweet-talked the RBS board into pursuing the three-way break-up bid even though, with Chicago-based bank LaSalle off the menu, they must surely have known it was in nobody’s interests but those of Merrills and “Don” Emilio Botin, patriarch of Banco Santander.
Warner, formerly of the Independent, can certainly write. Here are some choice cuts:-
I suspect she will only succeed in emasculating both her own company and the one she’s buying
Most mega mergers are more the result of executive boredom, delusions of grandeur and the siren call of fee hungry investment bankers than compelling industrial logic.
- To read Jeremy Warner’s piece in full click Why takeover bids rarely work
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Short URL: http://www.ianfraser.org/?p=1016
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