Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Destroy age-old perceptions!

CEOs have ripped apart shareholders’ wealth globally under the guise of M&As; Indian firms more so! B&E’s Manish K. Pandey, Deepak R. Patra and Karan Mehrishi undertake the most radical analysis of the recent past and destroy age-old perceptions!

Charles Prince is an equal, if not better peer for these heroes. He, as the Chief Administrative Officer, engineered the utterly disastrous $140 billion merger of Citibank with Travelers Group ten years back. Then he ensured the company jumped into the mortgage black hole. Till date, Citigroup has been forced to write off almost $41 billion because of Prince’s royal exigencies! He was “eased out” in November 2007! Apart from his wholly owned $94 million vested stock holdings in Citi, he got $28 million further stock options, (not forgetting the $53 million during his last four years as Group CEO), plus a pension of $1.74 million; and this apart from a $10.4 million “bonus” that shareholders were made to pay him. [Citi has now recruited Vikram Pandit as the CEO, paying him a cannon ball destroying never before seen signing bonus of $241 million! Since he has arrived, Citi stock prices have tumbled by 25%!].

December 31, 2007, saw Richard Parsons resigning as the greatest CEO of Time-Warner. Greatest, because he joined the board in 1991 [became President in 1995] and oversaw the supernova of a merger between Time and AOL. The companies had a combined value of $247 billion during the deal. Today, the combined entity is worth a mind numbingly low $58 billion. Parsons earned on an average $10.64 million per year. By the way, he’s now the Chairman of the group!

With $37 billion involved, Dieter Zetsche, then on the Daimler Benz board, squeezed through the merger with Chrysler. In 2007, CEO Zetsche made Daimler Chrysler part ways with a deal worth only 21.5% ($7.4 billion) of the total acquisition value! Millionaire Patricia Russo, CEO Alcatel-Lucent, has a history of destroying shareholder wealth. At the time of the merger of Alcatel and Lucent, the entity had a share price of $15.4 (March 31, 2006). July 24, 2008, the price is $6.09 (62% fall). CEO Meg Whitman, who ensured eBay bought off Skype, also ensured eBay’s price fell from close to $40 (September 9, 2005), to $25 (July 24, 2008). Shareholders be damned; she donated $30 million of her personal wealth to Princeton in 2007 to start the Whitman College!


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPMMalay Chaudhuri

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