Word: mergers
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...Union's Commissioner for Competition. Monti believed that the combination of Honeywell's cockpit controls with GE's engines and powerful aircraft financing division would stifle competition. In other words, he viewed with suspicion precisely those synergies that, for Welch, made the deal so attractive. Monti would approve the merger only if Welch made the kind of concessions that, from GE's standpoint, wrecked its whole point. The next morning Monti called Welch once more, to discuss how the apparent breakdown in talks should be handled. GE issued a statement saying that attempts at compromise fell "far short" of Monti...
...boss recounted the conversation to TIME, he told Card that he would appreciate "whatever help you can give us." In the formal meetings in Sweden, GE never came up. But on June 15, in Warsaw, Bush said he was "concerned" that the Europeans had rejected the merger. Monti was furious--not with Bush, he told TIME, but with those who had sought the President's help. Three days later Monti said he "deplore[d] attempts to...trigger political intervention." And though the case dragged on for two more weeks, the deal was dying a slow death...
Welcome to globalization. The collapse of the GE-Honeywell merger shows that companies that benefit from a global market can now be governed in all they do by any of the countries or regions in which they do business. There's no settled code of rules in the global marketplace, just a haphazard collection of local practices and habits. Still, the GE case is extraordinary. Never before have officials outside the U.S. nixed a merger between two giant American corporations already approved by the DOJ. Never before have U.S. companies lobbied so ferociously against their U.S. rivals in a foreign...
...Moreover, Monti was proud of the working relationship he had forged with his American counterparts; he told TIME he had "profound respect" for the U.S. regulators and described his own agency as a "junior institution." Before Christmas, when GE's competitors called on the case officer assigned to the merger, Enrique Gonzalez-Diaz, to persuade him to start a lengthy "phase two" investigation of the deal, Gonzalez-Diaz accused them of whining...
...opponents would have been able to pick up some of the Honeywell businesses Welch was ready to divest. Now they can't. At least some on the GE side of the case felt that the competitors' appetite for GE's spare parts would trump their fear of a merger. That didn't happen...