Compaq-HP's Christmas dirty tricks

THE PERIOD BETWEEN Christmas and Hogmanay is generally a time in Europe for excessive festivities and holidays. US citizens may be surprised to learn that some people were off work for weeks because of the happy occasion(s).

It's also a good time to lay off staff, because few outsiders will notice, and, if you're HP, apparently an excellent time to post your notice of a proposed takeover of Compaq in a European Union bulletin, in which objecting authorities have 10 days (including Christmas Day) to raise any problems they might have with a merger.

In fact, we believe the EU is likely, like the Canadian government, to give the go-ahead to the merger very soon, seeing as there are players like Sun, Dell, IBM and stacks of printer companies like Lexmarkia, to compete with the HP/Q behemoth.

But we do think that it might have been perhaps more fair if the bulletin didn't go up over the Christmas period.

Here are some URLs to chew over. This one refers to M.2609, HP and Compaq, notified on the 20th of December with a provisional deadline for a decision by the 31st of January.

The reference Official Journal C374 of 29.12.2001 is a link to the journal that was made on the 20th of December, giving objectors 10 days to put in their oars.

If anyone outside the EU reckons that Western Europe is some kind of snarling beast about these things, they might well like to look at this PDF which approved the takeover of DEC by Q in the Eckhard Pfeifferdom... µ