Law Commons^™

Conflicts In The Regulation Of Hostile Business Takeovers In The United State And The European Union, Barbara Ann White

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay focuses on hostile business takeovers to illustrate the significance that cultural differences among nations can play in developing a harmonized European Union law. After 12 years of development, the EU Directive regulating hostile takeovers, to everyone’s surprise, was voted down in the EU Parliament in 2001. The EU Parliament consists of the member nations and the movement to defeat the Directive was led by Germany, which had just suffered a brutal hostile takeover of its largest company by British raiders.

The “harmonization” efforts within the EU (i.e., establishing uniform laws among the member nations) mirrors the federalism movement …