In 2007, Fortis was the 20th largest business in the world by revenue but a risky and overly leveraged acquisition of ABN Amro led to the bank's demise and government-led selloff that left shareholders all but wiped out.It's too late to do anything about the massive losses, but some angry shareholders did show up at the company's board meeting in the Netherlands to give the brass a piece of their minds. The Associated Press has some great quotes from shareholders. They shouted "for shame!" as the board walked in, and one shareholder referred to the directors as "corpse robbers." Chairman Jan Michel Hessels was accused of having "no understanding of business."
To its credit, the board of directors stood there and took it like men, but like American CEOs, Mr. Hessels was unwilling to really cop to any personal responsibility: "I can't see that we should have done things very differently."
How a guy could lead a company from being one of the largest and most respected institutions in the world into liquidation with the help of an ill-advised acquisition and not see what should have been done differently is pretty appalling.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-01-2008 @ 1:28PM
BHarrison said...
Doesn't this unequivocally demonstrate the mentality of the INCOMPETENT and/or CORRUPT CEOs and Board members?
The only way to "recover" is to rid our corporations of these incompetent and corrupt fools who have the audacity to either refute any responsibility (in spite of the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars that they were paid to "manage" these corporations) or so blatantly corrupt that they spit in the face of the stockholders.
We have two decades of CEOs and upper management that should be forced out . . . and a fair number of them who should be prosecuted and sent to prision for fraud for having orchestrated pyramid and Ponzi schemes to defraud the stock holders.
We must have a "sockholder revolution" where the stockholders take back control of their corporations.
12-17-2008 @ 10:16AM
Fisserman said...
A 'shareholder revolution' won't help, since all major shareholders are companies themselves which are also run by managers, not enterpreneurs.
As long as people fail to understand that it's foolish to chase short-term profits and stop treating stock exchanges like major casino's, we will see multinationals falling over occcasionally.