Word: seagrams
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Wait, though. Like the plot of many another entertainment extravaganza, this one might be wildly overhyped. Perhaps Seagram is doing no more than Bronfman blandly asserts: making a long-term, "passive" investment in a company whose future earnings promise a bigger return than Seagram's declining liquor business. One of Bronfman's oldest show-business friends, movie producer David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire), insists it is not even the entertainment side of Time Warner that most intrigues Bronfman but the prospect for future profits on the information superhighway. Says Puttnam: "The idea that he has stars in his eyes...
...maybe Bronfman is aiming somewhere between a passive investment and an exorbitantly expensive takeover battle. Seagram might want to amass only enough stock to demand a voice in the company's varied businesses. Or maybe, deadening anticlimax though this thought might be, Bronfman has not made up his mind...
...case, a turning point seems to be close for Bronfman and for Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, who are widely reported to have been negotiating in person. Bronfman has to decide whether to buy enough additional Time Warner shares to push Seagram's holdings past the 15% mark. If he does, Levin must ponder whether to activate a device known as a "poison pill" designed specifically to prevent any "unfriendly" investor from acquiring more than 15%. Essentially, the company would issue enough new stock to knock a 15% holding down to about 5% or less. That, in effect, would force...
There are compromises possible too. One being talked up among security analysts: Seagram would buy up to 25% of Time Warner stock, but Bronfman would guarantee to freeze its holdings there for a long time and not try to unseat the present management. Levin in return would leave the poison pill in the corporate medicine cabinet and let Seagram place one or two members on Time Warner's 15-person board, giving Bronfman a strong voice but not control. At minimum, Levin will need to have at least some preliminary answers next Thursday for stockholders attending the annual meeting...
...stop calling me a goddam bootlegger?" Seeking respectability and reacting against the strong anti-Semitism of the Canadian elite, he plunged into Jewish affairs, raising huge sums in the 1930s and '40s to help the Zionist founders of what became Israel. His son Edgar Sr., who became head of Seagram's U.S. operations in 1957 and of the whole company on Mr. Sam's death in 1971, has continued that tradition. Though he is still chairman of Seagram, Edgar Sr. devotes most of his time to the World Jewish Congress, which he has headed since 1980. Among other things...