After hearing news this morning of the Wells Fargo’s $15.4 billion takeover of Wachovia, we figured there’d be some legal fallout. After all, it was only days ago that the world thought that Wachovia had reached a $2.16 billion deal with Citigroup (albeit a deal only for Citigroup’s banking operations).

Yesterday, as the markets appeared to be falling apart, Vice Chancellor Stephen Lamb (pictured) of the Delaware Court of Chancery was busy putting a private equity deal back together. Judge Lamb issued an opinion refusing to allow PE firm Apollo to walk away from its $6.5 billion acquisition of Huntsman Corp.

By no means do we pretend to know the Market Beat, but when a company’s stock gains on the apparent strength of its lawyers’ oral arguments, the LB takes notice. That’s what happened yesterday in Ottawa, when lawyers went before Canada’s Supreme Court to settle the highly-litigious planned buyout of telecom BCE by Ontario Teachers’ [...]

Last week, we noted a strongly worded opinion by NY district judge Lewis Kaplan that reprimanded two hedge-funds for the way they used derivatives to obscure their takeover plans for railroad CSX. Today, the WSJ’s Mara Lemos-Stein reports on a novel move by companies to take the matter into their own hands by “redefining stock [...]

The Bear story’s getting some legal juice.
The Journal’s Dennis Berman today asks, who’s making the rules in this deal? The Fed seems in charge for now, but what about Delaware courts? Or Congress? Monday’s deal, he says, could test “long-held conventions of corporate law: at what point of emergency are shareholder interests superseded by [...]

At the markets’ close today, Bear Stearns shares were trading at $5.33. It’s not much compared to where the stock was trading early last year, but it’s a significant premium over the $2.34 per share recently offered by J.P. Morgan Chase.
As the WSJ reported this morning, Bear bondholders were partly responsible for the stock’s rise [...]

When the Law Blog heard last night that Bear Stearns, the deflated investment bank that was torn to pieces by the mortgage crisis, had agreed to be sold to J.P. Morgan Chase for a measly two buck a share, a couple thoughts came to mind. The first was, “Argh, we should’ve pooled our resources and [...]