Bit of a late breakfast working my way back. Sorry.
“Governor Deval Patrick offered to.... use the state’s eminent domain powers to take the company, which has a market value in the billions, and sell it to the highest bidder.”
That's an unconstitutional seizure of property, but....
Related: Patrick Sees a Problem With State Budget
I thought it was a heads-up regarding immigration, but it looks much more devious now. This guy is a lame duck, so WTF is he thinking? What does he know about what is coming?
"Patrick offers to help end Market Basket feud" by Casey Ross | Globe Staff August 08, 2014
Meanwhile, the company’s internal battle continued with an exchange of sharply worded statements late Friday. Three members of the Market Basket’s board said they had asked former president Arthur T. Demoulas and his management team to return in an informal capacity to help rebuild the company’s tattered operations. But the directors said they would not put Demoulas back in charge of Market Basket.
They force him out and now they want him to come back and tell his people to go back to work? The only term I can thing of is ignorant assholes.
In a tart response, a spokesperson for Demoulas dismissed the offer as disingenuous. “This is an attempt to have him stabilize the company, while they consider selling it to another bidder,” she said in a statement. “This is far too serious a situation for these games. and attempts at window dressing.”
And then some.
The bitter Market Basket fight has crippled the operations of the company, which continues to lose millions of dollars a day. An employee walk-out in response to Demoulas’s firing last month has left stores with little food and a steep decline in business.
Demoulas has offered to buy the shares of rival family members. But the company’s board, controlled by his cousin, Arthur S. Demoulas, has said only that it is evaluating several offers. The parent company of the Hannaford Bros. Co., Delhaize Group SA, has also emerged as a serious bidder in recent days, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The longer this is drawn out the better the chance Market Basket and its employees are destroyed. That is what is going on here. That is the delay.
Patrick’s offer to intervene was yet another turn in an extraordinary saga.
It's all such DRAMA!
A former Harvard Business School professor who once served on Market Basket’s board urged Patrick to go even further, suggesting that he use the state’s eminent domain powers to take the company, which has a market value in the billions, and sell it to the highest bidder.
“I realize it’s not a conventional recommendation, but this is a family that’s been engaged in court battles for the better part of two decades,” said Nabil El-Hage, a specialist in corporate governance who joined the board in 2012. He resigned his post last September, concluding he could not help the company get over the family fight that was undermining it.
Corporate governance has failed. We have had 30 years of it, and it is an an unmitigated and mi$erable failure.
“In my opinion, there is no hope for reconciliation,” said El-Hage, adding that using eminent domain would allow the Demoulases to get fair market value for their ownership, while also delivering the company from the family’s dysfunction. The company’s board has been evaluating offers to buy it, including one from Arthur T. Demoulas, but there is no sign that a deal is imminent.
Sounds good, except that is NOT the FUNCTION of the EMINENT DOMAIN CLAUSE! It is not so the state can seize businesses because there is a labor dispute and then sell them off.
Patrick did not respond directly to El-Hage’s suggestion. Until Friday, the governor had rebuffed suggestions that he should intervene in the matter, asserting that government had no business interfering in a feud about a family business.
So what changed, gov'ner?
His position stood in stark contrast to statements by New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan, who has publicly urged Market Basket to end a stalemate putting more than 9,000 jobs at risk in her state.
“While this may be a private business dispute, it is having a significant financial impact on New Hampshire — on our families, consumers, farmers and other vendors,” Hassan said on Thursday. “And it will create new costs for the state’s Unemployment Trust Fund.”
Market Basket has 25,000 employees and 71 stores in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. Over the years, the two Arthur Demoulas cousins have tangled many times over management of the company and other matters. Arthur S. and his siblings won a legal ruling in the 1990s that found Arthur T.’s father defrauded them of shares in the company worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
In their statement yesterday, the three directors of the company, Eric Gebaide, Keith Cowan, and Ronald Weiner, said they have been working “around-the-clock” trying to negotiate a sale of the company while also limiting the damage done to the business, its employees, and customers.
They said Arthur T. had yet to respond to their proposal. “There is no reason to not meet in the middle,” they said in a statement. “Mr. Demoulas gets his management team back in place, associates can get back to doing their job, customers can get back to shopping, and the company gets the breathing room needed to create an orderly and productive way forward.”
But Arthur T. replied that he has offered to bring back his management team to stabilize the company on three occasions. “Each offer was rejected,” his statement said, adding that the proposal by the directors was mere “window dressing.”
I know who is on the right $ide of this one, and so do the Market Basket employees.
***********
Though Patrick had expressed reluctance to get involved in a private corporate battle, he did intervene in a prior dispute about the actions of the Hyatt hotel chain.
In 2009, he weighed in on the abrupt firing of 100 housekeepers at the three Boston-area Hyatts. Patrick called the Chicago-based chain’s chief executive, Mark Hoplamazian, to ask him to reconsider the decision to outsource the work....
They ended up firing the workers anyway and bringing in illegals to fill the jobs -- and Patrick didn't once threaten to seize the Hyatt hotels by eminent domain!
--more--"
The comment section is savaging Patrick, and for good reasons.
After they sell, I suggest anyone working at the new entity go union.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Arthur S., relatives accuse Arthur T. of bad faith in talks
The hatchet job on Arthur T did not appear in my printed version.
