Word: bronfman
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...take control. And last week, Vivendi's board signed off on a plan to increase its stake in a Moroccan telecom firm. But if he wanted to focus principally on telecommunications, then Fourtou's most logical move would have been to sell the U.S. entertainment assets outright; Edgar Bronfman Jr., who originally sold Universal to Messier and is on Vivendi's board, offered $8 billion in cash. Fourtou himself acknowledges that he doesn't yet have a final strategy. One possibility, he said last week, is to split Vivendi into two companies: one focusing on entertainment, the other on telecommunications...
...Vivendi Universal. Jean-René Fourtou, Messier's successor, described the payout as "indecent" and promised to contest the decision. He has little room for maneuver: the payout was written into a U.S. contract agreed to last July by two Vivendi directors, Marc Viénot and Edgar Bronfman Jr., to persuade Messier to depart quickly and quietly. The full board rejected the contract days later, after Messier had quit. The arbitration ruling highlights a fundamental difference between U.S. and European corporate practice: in France and some other European nations, a company board is required to act collectively...
...Bronfman thinks he has an ace in his close relationship with Vivendi CEO Jean-Rene Fourtou. But whether in Edgar Jr. they can trust elicits a Gallic shrug from shareholders. If he offers the right price for the Universal units, says Colette Neuville of a stock owners' group, "whether Bronfman can run it well is another matter that doesn't concern us." --With reporting by Peter Gumbel/Paris and Jeffrey Ressner and Sonja Steptoe/Los Angeles
...make no mistake, say his friends: Edgar Jr. would love to climb back into the mogul role. He has always loved Hollywood. The grandson of Seagram founder and former bootlegger Samuel Bronfman, Edgar Jr. began his career writing songs performed by Dionne Warwick and Ashford and Simpson and producing small movies. Pulled into the family business in 1982 by his father and made CEO in 1994, he scored wins by pushing premium brands like Chivas Regal and Absolut, and buying and selling Tropicana for a juicy profit. But Hollywood continued to beckon. He dumped the company's safe, lucrative stake...
...When Bronfman sold Seagram to Vivendi for shares of the French utility and telecommunications company's stock, he wasn't the only media exec seduced by an ill-considered merger; the wedding of Time Warner (parent of TIME) to AOL comes to mind. But that's not much comfort to the Bronfman clan, which has seen its stake shrivel (in part because of stock sales) from $6.5 billion to a little more than $1 billion. So where will Edgar Jr. get the money for his bid? Analysts say Universal Music Group could sell for about $7 billion, and the rest...