Word: french
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...telephone behemoth seven times its size. A cozy merger between Societe Generale and Paribas, two of France's leading banks, is thrown into disarray when a rival Paris financial house proposes to swallow them both. A battle for control of Italian fashion giant Gucci turns venomous when a French billionaire proclaims that he has snatched the company from the clutches of a rival French raider...
...advent of the euro has further heightened competition by eliminating the currency risk for investors, so that French mutual funds can safely invest, for example, in German companies for the first time. But another important effect of the same development is that European companies are all coming under increased pressure to improve their share performance for international shareholders regardless of local circumstances--even those that don't face global competition. "There's tremendous pressure from institutional investors who have seen the positive effects of shareholder power in the U.S. and are demanding similar moves in Europe," says Manfred Kets...
Size is so important that the prospect of creating a "champion of the European banking sector" prompted Banque Nationale de Paris to attempt to outmaneuver its rivals with a dramatic $37.6 billion offer to buy both Societe Generale and Paribas once their intended merger was announced, further jolting the French markets. If the BNP takeover ever goes through, it will create a bank with nearly $1 trillion in assets--Europe's largest--and give it an edge over the top U.S. bank, Citigroup, which currently has assets of $668.6 billion...
...chairman Michel Pebereau, who is regarded as a maverick in the clubby world of French banking, hailed his plan as "the best possible for the French banking system," but Societe Generale and Paribas rejected the offer as unfriendly. Fighting to save their original merger, the two takeover targets promised an additional $280 million in savings to their shareholders, bringing the total to $1 billion, closer to Pebereau's pledge of $1.4 billion in "synergies" at the new bank...
...experienced a similar sense of forced amiability at other Senior Bar events. This is no fault of the kind people who organize and publicize them, but more the product of my own inflated expectations. Perhaps I was imagining something more along the lines of the 50th reunion of the French Resistance: We'd sit on the terrace of an old cafe, trading war stories and examining our scars, laughing about how we'd beat the odds and made it out alive. To my disappointment, I found no such sense of esprit de corps at Senior Bar. Our shared destiny...