Arcelor and Mittal.

The Government of Luxembourg is to rush through a bill
on takeovers which could protect Arcelor, the steel company that is the
Grand Duchy’s largest employer, from the hostile €18.6bn (£12.7bn) bid
made at the end of January by Mittal Steel.

Last
week Luc Frieden, Luxembourg’s finance minister, said the bill adopted
an amended version of a European Union takeover directive that will
allow a besieged company’s board to take drastic action to repel a
hostile takeover without seeking prior consent from shareholder.

Wondrous. Our modern Europe, in which one of the four pillars is the free movement of capital. Don’t like the results? Change the rules. Still, at least they’ve changed the racist rhetoric about Mittal not being "European" enough.

3 responses

  1. The EU is just an extra place for politicians to do what they like best – make laws to boss us about. The politicians at national level still want to do as much of that as ever, if not more, so the net result is a politician’s dream, hundreds of conflicting laws all over the place ,a confusion to be solved by even more laws all made by ever more publically paid politicians.

  2. Mittal’s so rich he should just buy bloody Luxembourg and asset-strip it.

  3. The tactic’s employed by Arcelor,to “fend off” the takeover bid are getting tiresome, and I suspect winning them few friends.
    Surely it is up to the shareholders to decide, and if a few pampered euro executives lose their comfy jobs as a result, few tears will shed.

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