The Street website:
An internal JPMorgan Chase (JPM Quote) e-mail message describing a meeting involving CEO Jamie Dimon and Banco Santander (STD Quote) boss Emilio Botin offers a fascinating glimpse into the banking industry, and may also be worthy of scrutiny for antitrust reasons.
The JPMorgan e-mail, sent on June 5, 2008, came to light recently in connection to litigation stemming from that company's acquisition of Washington Mutual from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in September of that year in the biggest bank failure in the history of the American financial system.
Written by Jose Cerezo, an investment banker at JPMorgan, the e-mail describes the two bank bosses and a Santander executive board member, Juan Inciarte, talking about several possible acquisitions of interest to both banks at the time, including WaMu, Suntrust(STI Quote), PNC Financial(PNC Quote), and Wachovia (which was eventually acquired by Wells Fargo (WFC Quote)).
"It is important to have an open dialogue with them, as Santander would not pursue any of these opportunities if JPMorgan were to do the same (can't compete on price with JPMorgan for an acquisition in the USA). But Santander would probably hire JPMorgan as advisor if we are not going after them," Cerezo writes.
The suggestion in the e-mail that the banks may be divvying up the market, or that Santander might reward JPMorgan with an advisory fee if it chose not to pursue a target of interest to both banks, is troubling, according to Ian Ayres, an economics and law professor at Yale University.
0204 Jpm Email v2
No comments:
Post a Comment