Word: montis
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...European capital, his last big deal was falling apart. On that day in June, Welch had met twice with Mario Monti, the European 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...
...President Bush also expressed concern. His own antitrust regulators at the Justice Department let the G.E.-Honeywell marriage - a very neatly matched one-stop-shopping combination of jetliner engines and jetliner avionics that scared G.E.'s European competitors - slide through with only minor alterations. Then head euro-trustbuster Mario Monti and his commission had to go and mess it all up for reasons that struck American backers of American business interests (like Rockefeller and Bush) as a little too, well, nationalistic...
...Competition Commissioner Monti saw it as a straight question of competition. "The merger between GE and Honeywell, as it was notified, would have severely reduced competition in the aerospace industry and resulted ultimately in higher prices for customers, particularly airlines," he said...
...Europe is a bit more prevention-minded. The efficiencies of the GE-Honeywell deal would have brought prices down in the near-term; even Monti acknowledged that. But down the road, the EU worried that those lower prices would eventually starve the competition - especially the European competition - out of business. End result: one dominant company, monopolist's prices...
...American companies could get a deal past their own government, they could get it past the EU. (The last big merger spiked by the EU, WorldCom-Sprint, was denied by the U.S. a day later.) Now, Bush's hands may be off the gates, but Monti's are still on. Which suddenly makes Europe a very imposing gatekeeper...