Word: montis
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Which, in effect, it was. GE made a last-ditch effort, suggesting that it sell a part of GECAS in a private placing to a handpicked buyer. Monti didn't take that seriously. Honeywell's CEO Michael Bonsignore desperately offered to drop the purchase price of his company, but Welch wasn't interested. And so, on July 3, the full European Commission endorsed the decision that Monti had made. "We remain," said Monti, "distinctly unimpressed by any political pressure...
Those Washington Senators and Cabinet members who seem to think Monti was acting mainly to protect European companies are laughably off base. In Europe, everyone knows that GE's most determined opponent was United Technologies, Honeywell's jilted American suitor. Chris Bright, one of GE's lawyers in Brussels, says the Commission sent United Technologies away "to find the mud, and in the end, unfairly, the mud stuck." One more lesson: the slow confirmation process in Washington has a cost. Had James been confirmed as antitrust chief at the Justice Department by March, say, regulators on both sides...
...biggest lesson of all from the GE case is this one: soon, something like it will happen again. The Commission in Brussels is currently engaged in three investigations of Microsoft, one of them driven by an American competitor, Sun Microsystems. Monti's staff is looking at the behavior of chipmaker Intel, at the behest of one competitor from the U.S. and one from Taiwan. U.S. regulators will review Switzerland-based Nestle's purchase of Ralston Purina, which would consolidate more than 50% of the $3 billion U.S. cat-food market. For now, the only antitrust authorities that really matter...
...Monti and his counterparts around the world aren't taking on these cases because they want to stick it to the ugly Americans. They are doing so because in a globalized world, the country where a company has headquarters matters much less than where it does business. If one person understands that truth, it's Jack Welch. Why, TIME asked Welch, should a European be able to shape a merger between two American companies? "That's the law," replied Welch. "That really is just the way the world works." We'd all better get used...
...Mario Monti, the European Commission's chief antitrust enforcer, spoke last week in his Brussels office with TIME bureau chief James Graff...