Takeovers tangle
"Mergers and aquisitions of companies stem from looking for the effects of scale and greater regional or global influence. This tendency will be hard to stop," Wojciech Roman, a Deloitte partner, told Rzeczpospolita.
But while the Polish government's resistance to the BPH-Pekao merger triggers mounting criticism from the European Commission, Poland is not the only country reluctant to accept cross-border take-overs.
Only a couple of months earlier Italians expressed their discontent over the Dutch ABN Amro taking over the Italian lender Antonveneta. Also, the Spanish government is taking preventive measures to try and block German Eon's takeover of Endesa.
The free movement of capital may well be one of the pillars of the common EU market but even old members struggle to give up their national pride when it comes to handing over their largest companies to foreign hands.
After rumors circulated last year that American PepsiCo was planning to buy dairy producer Danone and that Wal-Mart was looking covetously at supermarket chain Carrefour, the panicked French government made up a list of 11 "strategic sectors" that should enjoy legal protection from foreign takeovers. But while the French fear of American domination is almost a tradition, the French reaction to buyout within the EU is treated with exactly the same distrust.
Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi even accused the French of blatant protectionism and asked the European Commission to intervene when Dominique de Villepin blocked the bid by the Italian electricity firm Enel to take over Suez, a French water and power company.
"I am determined to ensure that member states do not stand in the way of mergers falling within the Commission's exclusive competence," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said. "Otherwise the European Union's single market will descend into chaos." Hopefully, it won't be that bad, but it seems that sooner or later the governments will have to come to terms with the fact that in order to grow, companies will more and more often look for partners abroad.
