Management buyouts

A management buyout (MBO) is a form of acquisition where a company's existing managers acquire a large part or all of the company from either the parent company or from the private owners. Management and leveraged buyouts became phenomena of the 1980s. MBOs originated in the US and traversed the Atlantic, spreading first to the UK and throughout the rest of Europe. The venture capital industry has played a crucial role in the development of buyouts in Europe, especially in smaller deals in the UK, the Netherlands, and France.

Management buyouts are similar in all major legal aspects to any other acquisition of a company. The particular nature of the MBO lies in the position of the buyers as managers of the company and the practical consequences that follow from that. In particular, the due diligence process is likely to be limited as the buyers already have full knowledge of the company available to them. The seller is also unlikely to give any but the most basic warranties to the management, on the basis that the management know more about the company than the sellers do and therefore the sellers should not have to warrant the state of the company.

Some concerns about management buyouts are that the asymmetric information possessed by management may offer them unfair advantage relative to current owners. The impending possibility of an MBO may lead to principal–agent problems, moral hazard, and perhaps even the subtle downward manipulation of the stock price prior to sale via adverse information disclosure, including accelerated and aggressive loss recognition, public launching of questionable projects, and adverse earning surprises. Naturally, such corporate governance concerns also exist whenever current senior management is able to benefit personally from the sale of their company or its assets. This would include, for example, large parting bonuses for CEOs after a takeover or management buyout.

Since corporate valuation is often subject to considerable uncertainty and ambiguity, and since it can be heavily influenced by asymmetric or inside information, some question the validity of MBOs and consider them to potentially represent a form of insider trading.

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