The article is written from an incredibly biased point of view. Part of that bias is because evidently only people from the Dragon side commented to the report

The article is written from an incredibly biased point of view. Part of that bias is because evidently only people from the Dragon side commented to the reporter, and people from the Goldman Sachs side didn't comment, presumably because of the pending litigation. Just because one side comments to the media and the other side doesn't, doesn't imply anything about who's right and wrong, it's just a different strategy. As to the M&A fee itself, the NY Times article provides no context to know if that fee was high or low for the time. A $5 million fee to advise the sale of a $600 million company does not sound out of bounds at all. That's less than 1% of the value of the transaction, a far lower fee than eBay or many other marketplaces capture. In M&A banks provide advice to their clients, but also make markets --- finding potential buyers for their clients. Finally, it should be noted that while this deal went horribly wrong for Dragon, the NY Times did not bother to point out at that at the time of the deal none of the many investment banks and analysts that covered L.& H. noticed anything wrong, none of the shareholders of L.& H. noticed anything wrong, and until the WSJ did an investigation triggers by events that happened after the sale, no newspaper, including the NY Times, noticed anything wrong either.