It’s funny how an unplanned occurrence can trigger your interest in a genre of books. It happened to me over 20 years when I picked up, from a stall selling secondhand books, a paperback called Takeovers by journalists Ivan Fellon and James Srodes. The book was first published in Great Britain in 1987 by Hamish Hamilton; the one I bought (I don’t remember for how much) was a 1988 edition by Pan Books. The cover wasn’t too exciting — a small yellow fish was being devoured by a big blue fish with yellow eyes, which was being devoured by a bigger fish, which was….. A strap on top said: “The truth behind the latest headlines.” The information on the back didn’t help much. The index could have been in Greek. The book had no pictures. It was a bold gamble for an underpaid journalist.
The reason I picked up Takeovers was the glossary of business terms right at the beginning. It was still, then, the early days of liberalisation. The only hostile takeover one had heard of was Swraj Paul’s unsuccessful raid on Escorts and DCM. But, as a business journalist, one was supposed to be familiar with terms like “poison pill”, “scorched-earth policy”, “greenmail”,” pac-man defence”, “shark repellant”, “Saturday night special”, et cetera. That, honestly, was what made me buy the book — a small investment to learn the survival mantra for the post-liberalisation world.
As I started to read the book, I was transfixed: this was better than fiction, racier than Ludlum. The drama and intrigue, the mix of greed and ego, was simply too good to put down. This was my first glimpse into the world of policy makers, spin doctors and lobbyists — raiders and defenders, brokers and bankers. Takeovers became my gateway into the world of Rupert Murdoch, James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, T Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky, Mike Milken and the like. I read the book, close to 300 pages of it, in a couple of days. Since then, I have read it a few more times and never has it failed to thrill, though the rules of diminishing returns did come into play. I have rarely read fiction since then. Real life is far more interesting. Travelling inside the fertile minds of businessmen, bankers and deal makers can be fascinating — that’s the key takeaway from Takeovers.
I suggest you read the book. You may chance upon it in some secondhand book store, like I did, or you could order it from Amazon.com, where the paperback edition is available for less than a dollar. Believe me, it will be money well spent. What will strike you is that insider trading was rampant in the West during that time (Fellon and Srodes researched Takeovers from 1984 to 1987, conducting hundreds of interviews), more in New York than in London, and it was often the centrepiece of many hostile takeovers. The ingenuity of the dramatis personae was truly amazing, in most cases. You will learn that public policy even abroad has been the handmaiden of powerful corporate chieftains. National pride too has a role to play. So, a partial takeover bid made by Sikorsky of the US for Westland Helicopters in 1986 cost British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher two of her cabinet ministers and made her remark, to an aide, that “by six this evening I may no longer be prime minister”. She survived, of course, but the Westland affair would have a lasting impact on takeovers in England, including General Motors’s sub-sequent buyout of Land Rover (now owned by Tata Motors).
In India, unfortunately, never have such stories been told.
