Renewed Focus on Takeover Defenses

While attitudes a year ago might have suggested that 2008 would be a year of great stockholder activism with takeover defenses continuing to fade from the scene, the drying up of credit for M&A transactions and plunging stock prices and asset values actually caused public companies to re-examine their preparedness for hostile activity and, ironically, led to the re-emergence of a takeover defense that had fallen out of favor in recent years.

31 minute readFebruary 19, 2009 at 09:44 AM

Robert S. Reder, Rachel Fink

Alison Fraser

To say the least, 2008 was a tumultuous time in the financial markets. In addition to failures and bargain-basement sales of major financial institutions, unprecedented governmental intervention in the markets, aborted M&A deals and a record-sized Ponzi scheme, the year witnessed an increased volume of hostile and unsolicited takeover activity.

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