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Well the Devil's advocate view is that Mr. Dell orchestrated the sale to himself without giving the market the knowledge he possessed at the time of the sale. I

Well the Devil's advocate view is that Mr. Dell orchestrated the sale to himself without giving the market the knowledge he possessed at the time of the sale. I do not know the details of the case, but Mr. Dell as the CEO of Dell is not a normal buyer, he is someone that has a legal obligation to the shareholders to deliver them maximum value. The lawyers here would have to prove that Mr. Dell was working in his own interest here, and not in the shareholders' interests.

rubidium 10y ago
That's not really the challenge being placed in this case: " The best reply, especially in a conflicted management buyout where the buyer is also the CEO, is often along the lines of "because management deliberately undermined the sales process to prevent other bidders from seeing the company's true value, so they could take it for themselves on the cheap." But that's not really what happened here; the court found that, while there were some inherent conflicts of interest, Dell's independent directors basically did a bang-up job of running the sales process, and even Michael Dell himself -- despite being both the CEO and the prospective buyer of the company -- behaved like a prince. Actually, reading the opinion, you almost get the sense that Michael Dell didn't do this leveraged buyout for the money. It was just an intellectual engagement, a point of principle. He thought the stock was undervalued, and he wanted to argue his case, and the way you argue that is by buying all the stock."