Weyland's undiplomatic message

By Editorial Staff
November 2001
Institutional Investor Magazine

When he was Luxembourg's ambassador to the EU, Joseph Weyland helped negotiate the Maastricht Treaty. But establishing the ground rules for European union was trivial, it seems, compared with deciding on a merger and acquisitions code.

The EU recently rejected a proposal for uniform European takeover laws, and Weyland, now ambassador to Britain, has reason to rue this legislative equivocation.
He's a party to a lawsuit back home that contends that minority investors - he among them - were unfairly discriminated against when German media giant Bertelsmann took control of Luxembourg-listed Eurobroadcaster RTL Group. Along with several other prominent Luxembourgers, including banker Alain Georges, Weyland charges that RTL's small investors were shortchanged when Belgian billionaire Albert Frère swapped 30 percent of the company for 25.1 percent of unlisted Bertelsmann. The RTL stake had a market value of E4 billion ($3.6 billion); analysts estimate that the stake in Bertelsmann, Europe's largest media company, was worth E12 billion.
In effect, Frère's holding company, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, "got an E8 billion control premium, yet we received nothing - it's outrageous," complains the 58-year-old Weyland. (GBL declined to comment.) "This case shows how urgent it is to get better regulations, not just in Luxembourg but throughout Europe. I resent the whole exercise we have to go through to assert our rights."