Word: paramount
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Circling each other warily, always on the lookout for decisive openings, Time Inc. and Paramount Communications engaged in a fresh round of legal and financial swordplay last week. No clear winner emerged in the epic duel, but the thrusts and parries offered Wall Street speculators plenty of titillation -- and uncertainty. Time's board started off by rejecting Paramount's sweetened takeover bid, in which the company raised its offer for Time from $175 to $200 a share, or a total of more than $12 billion. The Time directors reiterated their plan to go ahead with an acquisition of Warner Communications...
Others expressed anger that the Time directors had refused to go along with the Paramount bid, which could deliver a windfall to Time stockholders. There were also expressions of concern about the debt of up to $14 billion that will burden the Time-Warner combination. Although the initial merger deal had been hailed for being debt-free, Time Chairman J. Richard Munro argued that the cash flow of the two companies will be adequate to service the debt. "We hope we can avoid layoffs and asset sales," he said. "The best way to pay off the debt will be through...
...legal struggle, meanwhile, spread to hundreds of cities in which Time's cable-television subsidiary owns franchises. One of Time's anti-takeover strategies has been to say that the transfer of the local cable licenses required by a Paramount takeover would create crippling delays. Time won some support on that front when the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the attorneys general of 13 states expressed concern to the Federal Communications Commission that a hostile takeover of Time's cable-TV operations might violate laws that give state and local governments the right to approve changes in ownership...
...When Roger Ailes was asked to help get Bush elected, he applied his paramount rule for taking a job: "The candidate can't be nuts." Ailes figured then and figures today that he found a man cast in the concrete of sanity...
Outraged by industrial accidents and financial misdeeds, activists demand a more responsible corporate America. -- Paramount boosts its bid for Time Inc. to $12 billion...