"Goldman received a $20 million fee for playing matchmaker for El Paso. The fee, of course, was not disclosed, nor was the Kinder Morgan stake owned by Goldman Sachs’s private equity arm, worth some $4 billion." [DealBook]
Delaware Chancellor Leo Strine has a bright future in blogging if chancelling doesn't work out for him. Here's how he describes Kinder Morgan's negotiations to buy El Paso, specifically KMI CEO Rich Kinder's price retrade with EP CEO Doug Foshee: Kinder said “oops, we made a mistake. We relied on a bullish set of analyst projections in order to make our bid. Our bad. Although we were tough enough to threaten going hostile, we just can’t stand by our bid.” Instead of telling Kinder where to put his drilling equipment, Foshee backed down. I umm ... I'm pretty sure that that quote from Kinder is approximate. Anyway, this is from Strine's opinion refusing to block the KMI-EP merger from proceeding even though he is pretty pissed about some of the apparent conflicts of interest in the deal, including that Goldman Sachs owns almost 20% of KMI while also advising EP, that the lead GS banker owned some KMI stock that he didn't disclose, and that Foshee negotiated the merger single-handed while also maybe thinking about possibly LBOing EP's E&P business for his own self. Lucrative though my current pseudoprofession is, I suspect that if Strine ever leaves the chancelling racket he'd probably prefer to try his hand at merging and/or acquiring. Certainly he is fond of dispensing tactical advice:
The shareholder meeting to approve the sale of a public company is always a special occasion, both intense and bittersweet. Shareholders who have loyally stood by the target through its ups and downs over the years want to take some time to say goodbye, but they also know that the debate will be lively and spontaneous and that anything can happen: one passionate orator can sway the crowd for or against the deal. With so much riding on the meeting, space is at a premium; smart shareholders book their flights early, and I would not be surprised if El Paso shareholders camped out outside the Hyatt Regency Houston*, 1200 Louisiana Street, Houston, Texas 77002, far in advance of the shareholder meeting scheduled for 9 a.m. tomorrow. And they will be distraught to learn that the meeting was just moved to Friday. No, just kidding, nobody goes to these** and they're pointless formalities. You can tell because: El Paso today said it was adjourning the shareholder vote on its proposed sale to Kinder Morgan until Friday, instead of Tuesday, following a judge’s criticism of the company’s sale negotiations. But at the same time, El Paso said as of Friday it has received votes from 70% of the outstanding shares, with 98.5% of those shares voting in favor of the deal. That tally is not official and could change. Shareholders that had already cast their ballots now have until Friday’s deadline to change their votes. A simple majority is all that is needed for the vote to be approved. Votes could change until Friday. ARE YOU DYING OF SUSPENSE? I guess everyone already knows this but here we are with an internet so it bears repeating: Shareholder litigation challenging merger and acquisition (M&A) deals has increased substantially in recent years. To study this increase and characterize the recent litigation, Cornerstone Research and Professor Robert Daines of the Stanford Law School reviewed reports of M&A shareholder litigation in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings related to acquisitions of U.S. public companies valued over $100 million and announced in 2010 or 2011. We found that almost every acquisition of that size elicited multiple lawsuits, which were filed shortly after the deal’s announcement and often settled before the deal’s closing. Only a small fraction of these lawsuits resulted in payments to shareholders; the majority settled for additional disclosures or, less frequently, changes in merger terms, such as deal protection provisions. Interestingly, while requiring additional disclosures is a common outcome, we have not encountered a case in which shareholders rejected the deal after the additional disclosures were provided. That's from this blog post; the slightly longer paper is here. The emphasis is mine and, y'know, look at it: every M&A deal is challenged (actually 96% of deals over $1bn), virtually none (5%) of the challenges result in any improved payment to shareholders, and all the terrible information about conflicts that plaintiffs' lawyers discover somehow never convinces shareholders to change their votes. The one constant is that plaintiffs' lawyers get paid - an average of $1.2mm in the settlements that Cornerstone and Daines looked at. These suits often focus on incentives of the target's investment bankers, who are paid only if a deal is completed; I suspect those bankers would love to be in an industry where they could be paid on 100% of assignments while only succeeding at 5% of them. The El Paso case is interesting because judge is pretty pissed at the conflicts there and how they were handled, and sort of made known that he was thinking about awarding damages to El Paso shareholders - possibly in the form of judicially raising the deal price by 68 cents or so. (That's the difference between, roughly, the price that KMI and EP ultimately agreed on and the higher price of $27.55 in cash that KMI had initially offered.) That's pretty rough justice. Your model of merger negotiations could be that you negotiate to the one market-clearing price where, for a penny more, the acquirer would say no, and for a penny less, the target would say no, but that of course isn't the case. There's just a range of plausible prices and you sort of hope that the deal shakes out in that range based on negotiating acumen or whatever on either side. You sort of hope - I do, anyway - that it doesn't shake out based on a judge picking a number out of a hat. You see that here. Kinder Morgan of course has every incentive now to testify that the final price - call it $26.87, loosely - was as high as it was willing to go, and that it would have walked if El Paso had pushed for any more. But it's willing to close the deal even though it seems like, I dunno, a 50/50 chance that a judge will in effect force it to $27.55. And El Paso shareholders - well, maybe they were screwed by missing out on the chance to get paid $27.55. But of course if that was the only price they were willing to sell at, they wouldn't be selling at $26.87. And 98.5% of them seem fine right there. El Paso Delays Shareholder Vote, But Early Tally Shows Approval Likely [Deal Journal] El Paso Delays Vote on Kinder Morgan Deal (by a Few Days) [DealBook] Developments in M&A Shareholder Litigation [Harvard Law School Monstrosity] * As it happens I've probably spent more time at that hotel than any other in the world, and would be remiss not to recommend the burger at the Shula's in the lobby.. ** I actually went to one once and it was exactly what you'd expect: some executives say nice things about each other for 20 minutes, then about half a dozen retirees get up one at a time to be like "I remember when stamps were a nickel."