Until proved innocent
IT IS a sure sign that the merger epidemic is on its way out when we see a general rush to offer miraculous cures. The Takeover Panel itself, now looking more like a case than a treatment, was called into being 20 years ago after some robust tactics by Morgan Grenfell and Cazenove. That marked the end of the takeover boom of the 1960s, in its day the biggest ever, and remembered today by such various legacies as and National Westminster Bank, GEC, and British Leyland. Now we have Roy Hattersley proposing — as was easy enough to predict — that the balance of proof in mergers should be shifted, so that the would-be taker-over would have to show the Monopolies Commission that his intentions were innocent. So the sitting board, like the sitting tenant, would be protected. There are quite enough boards who believe that their jobs- are their property, without giving that principle the backing of law. It is a singularly conserva- tive approach, implying that on the corpo- rate scene whatever is, is right.
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