September 14, 2010
Poison Pill Forum: The Revival of Interco?
Posted by Gordon Smith

City Capital Associates Ltd. Partnership v. Interco Inc. 551 A.2d 787 (Del.Ch. 1988) is one of my favorite Delaware opinions. Written by Chancellor Allen in 1988, Interco was the case in which Unocal was famously labelled "the most innovative and promising case in our recent corporation law." Ironically, Interco earned a red flag in Westlaw when the Delaware Supreme Court described the case as a "narrow and rigid construction of Unocal" and "reject[ed] such approach as not in keeping with a proper Unocal analysis." See Paramount Communications, Inc. v. Time Inc., 571 A.2d 1140, 1153 (Del.,1989). Now, over 20 years after Interco's apparent demise, Steve Davidoff suggests that Delaware's recent poison pill jurisprudence may be making room for Interco again. I agree.

Though Interco is still well known among corporate lawyers as a case in which Chancellor Allen ordered the redemption of a poison pill under Unocal, the case expresses some concern about Unocal's implications:

The danger that [Unocal] poses is, of course, that courts--in exercising some element of substantive judgment--will too readily seek to assert the primacy of their own view on a question upon which reasonable, completely disinterested minds might differ. Thus, inartfully applied, the Unocal form of analysis could permit an unraveling of the well-made fabric of the business judgment rule in this important context. Accordingly, whenever, as in this case, this court is required to apply the Unocal form of review, it should do so cautiously, with a clear appreciation for the risks and special responsibility this approach entails.

In retrospect, this hand wringing seems quaint, as the Delaware courts (particularly the Delaware Supreme Court) have routinely deferred to defensive actions by target directors. Indeed, after Unitrin modified the Unocal standard in 1995, it was hard to imagine a defensive measure that would be invalidated. The Delaware Supreme Court seemed so deferential to target boards that Bob Thompson and I declared Unocal a "dead letter" in 2001, though the Court of Chancery had invalidated a "dead hand" pill and a "no hand" pill a few years earlier. Our point was simply that defensive measures had to be extreme -- "show stoppers" in the parlance of the Delaware courts -- before they would be invalidated. Anything short of that extreme -- even a pill that makes a hostile takeover substantially harder, such as the 5% pill in Selectica, Inc. v. Versata Enterprises, Inc. -- would be approved as a proportionate response to almost any cognizable threat.

Interco offered a more nuanced interpretation of Unocal than the one developed in the subsequent Delaware Supreme Court cases. According to Chancellor Allen, "in the setting of a noncoercive offer, absent unusual facts, there may come a time when a board's fiduciary duty will require it to redeem the rights and to permit the shareholders to choose." 

Note that the premise for redemption in Interco is a noncoercive offer. As Professor Davidoff observes, Vice Chancellor Strine seems to invoke the spirit of Interco in Yucaipa American Alliance Fund II, L.P. v. Riggio, decided last month, when he writes: "there is a plausible argument that a rights plan could be considered preclusive, based on an examination of real world market considerations, when a bidder who makes an all shares, structurally non-coercive offer has: (1) won a proxy contest for a third of the seats of a classified board; (2) is not able to proceed with its tender offer for another year because the incumbent board majority will not redeem the rights as to the offer; and (3) is required to take all the various economic risks that would come with maintaining the bid for another year."

The bigger point that I would like to make in this post, however, is that Interco was animated by a sophisticated analysis of the threat prong under Unocal. Where the threat is relatively mild (e.g., "in the setting of a noncoercive offer"), the response should be accordingly muted. The Court of Chancery has been more attentive to this sort of analysis in recent years, and all three recent poison pill cases have something interesting to say on this issue.

  • In Selectica the target board of directors was attempting to "prevent the inadvertent fortfeiture of potentially valuable assets, not to proteact against hostile takeover attempts." Vice Chancellor Noble reasoned, "the protection of corporate assets against an outside threat is arguably a more important concern of the Board than restricting who the owners of the Company might be." Given the elevated threat, a more severe defensive action was considered reasonable. (For an argument that the Delaware courts have gone too far, see the latest by Paul Edelman and Randall Thomas.)
  • In Yucaipa, Vice Chancellor Strine identified the "threat that the corporation's stockholders would relinquish control through a creeping acquisition without the benefit of receiving a control premium." This does not seem like a terribly severe threat, given the existence of 13D filings that would place the market on alert for creeping acquisitions. Nevertheless, the defensive action in this case was not severe. Yucaipa conceded that the Rights Plan was not preclusive, which left only the issue of whether the Rights Plan fell within the "range of reasonableness" -- a business judgment rule-like inquiry that target boards rarely fail to satisfy.
  • In eBay v. Newmark, as noted in my earlier post, Chancellor Chandler held that the target directors did not reasonably perceive a threat to the corporation's policy and effectiveness. Thus, the poison pill was unjustified.

While we might debate the correctness of any of these decisions, I applaud the Court of Chancery for continuing to develop its Unocal jurisprudence. Like Chancellor Allen, I have long thought that Unocal has great potential to calibrate the actions of incumbent directors. The question remains: will the Delaware Supreme Court embrace this more nuanced analysis?

Corporate Law, Delaware, Forum: Poison Pills, M&A | Bookmark

TrackBacks (0)

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345157d569e20134875299f0970c

Links to weblogs that reference Poison Pill Forum: The Revival of Interco?:

Bloggers
Papers
Posts
Recent Comments
Popular Threads
Search The Glom
The Glom on Twitter
Archives by Topic
Archives by Date
January 2019
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Miscellaneous Links