Nov 30, 2007 06:37 PM
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When I picked up this book, I referred to the credits on the back cover and the
one that caught me was: "I thought a lot of the merger mania was madness before,
but I didn't know how murderous it could be until I read Merger. The Firm meets
Wall Street in this explosion of merger mayhem!" - Walter Wager, Edgar
Award-winning author of Die Hard 2 Being a John Grisham fan and having gathered
some imagination of the legal world, attorneys, counsels, I now wanted to gauge
how exciting this must be if the “The Firm” ACTUALLY met “The Wallstreet.” It
WAS exciting! The book starts with a formation of a merger deal and around it
is a lot of investment banking truths and unprovable crimes, manipulations by
law firms, forgery, and a gruesome murder. High-speed and racy on-the-edge
events that will not allow you to put down the book. Since the book is written
by an investment banker, it provides a lot of insider information into insider
trading, how ESOPs are used as a tool, stock price manipulation etc. There are
five pivotal characters in the book- Vik Suri the acquirer CEO, Amanda Fleming-
the Times investigative journalist, Tom Carter-the banker, Craig Michaels—the
target CEO, Jack Ward—the FBI. The author describes each character IN DETAIL,
which at times gets boring. However, explanations of the pivotal character
Vikram Suri is done to perfection. His knack of smartly using and misusing his
pawns, greed that matches his ability has been described supremely well. The
plot as a case study: Trinet wants to buy Luxor for business purposes. A certain
amount for the deal is agreed upon by the two boards. The two CEOs have a
private meeting, eventually the deal is disapproved. Deliberate information leak
to the media by one company to manipulate the share price of the other. The two
CEOs again strike a hush-hush deal duping all stakeholders, bankers,
shareholders, legal counsel, etc. But, not all of this is voluntary between the
two CEOs. One of them is the murderous manipulator, and the other is a
chicken-hearted cheapster. The best part of the book, apart from the plot is the
author’s ability to portray boring merger deals in a simple but interesting
language. Also, a section where the author describes the reasons for Dubai
rising to being favorite among businessmen to conduct legal and not-so-legal
transactions is quite entertaining. A must read for MSians with interest in
banking, legal affairs, M&As.
