Word: rjr
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Swamped by a wave of resentment, Johnson rushed last week to reassure the RJR board that he had intended all along to share the newly created wealth with the 15,000 employees who would remain after the breakup. "I wasn't going to take 18% of this company for seven people," Johnson told TIME in his first interview since the buyout offer. "If I'd known it was going to be in the newspapers, I would have said, 'Look, there's going...
Even as Johnson backed away from his huge initial stake, rival bidders rushed in to get theirs. The competing offers turned the fight for RJR Nabisco, whose brands range from Animals Crackers to Winston cigarettes, into the brassiest and potentially most damaging brawl in Wall Street history. By last week three groups were locked in a titanic struggle for the company (1987 revenues: $15.8 billion), and the offering price has climbed above $26 billion -- more than the gross national product of Peru or Portugal and twice the sum that Chevron paid for Gulf Oil in 1984 in the largest previous...
...bring to American industry, that they raise deep and disturbing doubts about the direction of U.S. business at a time when many firms lag badly in foreign competition. Seldom since the age of the 19th century robber barons has corporate behavior been so open to question. The battle for RJR Nabisco seems to have crossed an invisible line that separates reasonable conduct from anarchy...
Except for its scale, the proposed RJR breakup was like many of the fruitless paper-shuffling deals that have proliferated in the past decade. The management group is planning to take apart a merger, between RJR and Nabisco, that they hailed only three years ago as a brilliant strategic move. "What is being done threatens the very basis of our capitalist system," said John Creedon, president of Metropolitan Life Insurance company, which is suing RJR because the potential buyout has undermined the value of all bonds that the food and tobacco company sold before the announcement. Not everyone was alarmed...
...RJR battle has brought several U.S. business trends of the past decade under greater scrutiny in Washington. Among the political concerns...