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MV Agusta really DID screw Harley
When Harley-Davidson announced that MV would be sold back to Castiglioni, they didn’t mention the price of the sale. As a publicly traded company, however, you can’t actually keep that a secret.
Via the Wall Street Journal, according to the company’s 8-K filing, the sale price was 3 Euros. But get this:
In the filing Harley said it “contributed 20 million Euros to MV as operating capital” that was put in escrow and is available to the buyer over a 12-month period. The buyer is Claudio Castiglioni, who, with his brother Gianfranco, ran MV Agusta for years before selling it to Harley two years ago for about $109 million.
So, H-D paid $109 million for MV, they then had to pay $162.6 million in write-downs to cover MV’s bad debts, and then they had to pay Castiglioni another $20 million to take it back.
I’m sorry, but that’s just hilarious!
But, of course, I’m not a Harley shareholder. They probably aren’t as amused to learn this.
Reminds me of Novell buy WordPerfect for over a $1 billion, then a couple years later selling it to Corel for about $100 million.
These are scary signs that company management has a “make the deal” problem. Where “making the deal” is more important than what is in the “deal.”
The union members in Milwaukee are being told to renegotiate their contract 2 years early to save a mere 50 million or the factory moves out of town. I told a friend in the union about this and she was pissed….