April 23, 2014
Another New Paradigm: Corporate & Hedgie Team Up for Hostile Bid
As noted in the DealBook piece, William Ackman, the well-known hedge fund manager, has teamed up with Valeant, a big health care company, to make a hostile bid for Allergan. Here’s an excerpt from that article:
If successful, the joint bid by a hedge fund and a corporate acquirer could provide a new template for how deals are done in an era of increased activity by activist investors. “This is a harbinger of a much wider range of kinds of deals,” said Ronald J. Gilson, a professor of business law at Stanford Law School. “There are a lot of people with a lot of money who can act very quickly, and they don’t have to do things that look like last week’s deal.”
This article notes that there might have been insider trading leaks ahead of the bid. Here’s a WSJ article on the latest activist investing agenda (buybacks & cost cuts) – and this blog analyzes what is an “activist white paper” (here’s an example of one)…