Matt Levine, Columnist

Samsung Group Is Doing a Cozy Merger

Lord, grant me good corporate governance, but not yet.

July 1, 2015 at 8:20 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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A South Korean court on Tuesday ruled against Elliott Associates LP in its activist fight over a proposed merger of Samsung C&T Corporation. I have said before that if Elliott were suing in Delaware, I'd like its chances. Of course, it's not suing in Delaware -- it's suing in South Korea -- but this merger, from let us say the standpoint of American corporate governance, looks awfully kooky.

Samsung C&T Corporation is, as its initials suggest, a construction and trading corporation. It does some construction and some trading. But it also owns a lot of stock in other publicly traded companies in the broader Samsung group. Most notably, it owns about 4 percent of Samsung Electronics, worth about 7.6 trillion won ($6.8 billion). If you add other publicly listed equity stakes, you get a total of about 11.8 trillion won ($10.6 billion).1435760969303