Word: greenmailer
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Pickens, chief of Mesa Petroleum Inc., is known for his frequent attempts to seize a controlling interest in a company and then to sell-out at a profit once his threat becomes apparent. Such tactics are known as "greenmail...
...have made assaults on Gulf, Cities Service and Phillips that yielded before-tax profits of about $880 million. Unocal has girded for the assault with a battery of secret antitakeover defenses. Unocal's tough-as- tacks chairman, Fred Hartley, vows he will fight rather than buy off Pickens with greenmail. Stay tuned...
Journalese is rich in mystic nouns: gentrification, quichification, greenmail, dealignment, watershed elections and apron strings (the political coattails of a female candidate). But students of the language agree that adjectives do most of the work, smuggling in actual information under the guise of normal journalism. Thus the use of soft-spoken (mousy), loyal (dumb), high-minded (inept), hardworking (plodding), self-made (crooked) and pragmatic (totally immoral). A person who is dangerous as well as immoral can be described as a fierce competitor or gut fighter, and a meddler who cannot leave his subordinates alone is a hands-on executive. When...
...Greenmailer. One of Icahn's partners in the Phillips struggle is Saul Steinberg, 45, an expert in the fine art of greenmail. In that corporate maneuver, an investor buys up a large block of stock in a company and threatens to take it over in hopes that the firm's management will become frightened and buy the shares back at a higher price than the stockholders can get, just to get rid of the raider. Last summer, in such a ploy, Steinberg bought 11.1% of Walt Disney Productions. After a long battle with Disney management, he sold the stock...
Pickens' spectacular gains have led critics to charge that he is really an adept practitioner of "greenmail." A greenmailer creates the threat of a takeover by buying a big chunk of a company's stock. He then sells the shares back to the firm at a premium when its executives, fearing the loss of their jobs in a takeover, agree to buy him out. Pickens denies any intention of greenmail: "If we had wanted to greenmail Phillips, it would have been a substantially different deal. Instead, we did stay in and we did work hard for the stockholders...