Daniel Wolf is a partner at Kirkland & Ellis focusing on mergers and acquisitions. The following post is based on a Kirkland memorandum by Mr. Wolf. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Case Against Board Veto in Corporate Takeovers by Lucian Bebchuk.
The confluence of a number of overlapping factors—including an uptick in global and cross-border M&A activity, a resurgence in unsolicited takeover offers, the continued flow of tax inversion transactions, and the growth of activism in non-U.S. markets—means that U.S. companies and investors are more often facing unfamiliar takeover (and antitakeover) regimes as they evaluate and pursue offers for foreign targets. While experienced dealmakers are often well-versed in the nuances of friendly transactions with a foreign seller, the defenses available, and sometimes unavailable, to foreign companies facing unsolicited or hostile offers occasionally come as a surprise and complicate the pursuit or defense of these bids.
While a comprehensive survey of antitakeover regimes in various foreign jurisdictions is well beyond the scope of this post, it is instructive to highlight a number of examples where the regime—mandatory or permissive—departs significantly from U.S. practices, even in countries with well-developed legal systems and capital markets.
In a number of jurisdictions, the applicable takeover rules can be seen to facilitate, or even encourage, offerors in taking rejected overtures to the public shareholders: