De NYT schrijft niet over grote aandeelhouder

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Hoe een van de twee grote jongens je ten gronde kan richten.

J.P. Morgan verkoopt een lening van je aan een concurrent, en volgens de
voorwaarden van de lening MOET je allerlei intieme details van je
bedrijf aan de houder van de lening verstrekken.

Groet / Cees

The Story the New York Times Won't Touch
http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/sausage/2010/02/20/story-new-york-times-wont-touch
By James Ledbetter
Posted Saturday, February 20, 2010 - 12:09pm

A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim
increased his stake in the New York Times Company (NYT), I wrote "I pity
the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn't
out of favor with the paper's new sugar daddy." Now we have a very clear
example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it's not pretty,
and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.

For the last several days, bloggers and many business news outlets have
been revealing truly astounding details from a court case involving J.P.
Morgan Chase (JPM) and two large Mexican telecom companies, one of which
is Slim's. Blogger Felix Salmon at Reuters was one of the earliest to
cover this at length; his summary of the case gets right to the heart of it:

     JP Morgan took one of its longest-standing clients in Mexico —
Grupo Televisa — and tried to hand all of its secrets over to its
biggest rival, Carlos Slim. And the way it tried to do that was by
selling Slim a loan larded up with covenants which would essentially
force Televisa to reveal any and all information to the holder of the debt.

This is not simply Salmon's point of view. In late January, U.S. federal
judge Jed S. Rakoff declared that J.P. Morgan acted "in bad faith," and
participated in an "end run, if not a down right sham," by helping
transfer a Grupo Televisa loan to a bank controlled by Slim, who just
happens to own Grupo Televisa's rival.

According to the account in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, the way that
the proposed transfer of a $225 million loan was structured would have
effectively required Grupo Televisa's Cablevision division to hand over
to its competitor information including its "budgets, tallies of capital
investments, strategic plans, contract terms for its subscribers and
plans for improvements at its growing digital network in Mexico City."

That seems like a pretty bad way for J.P. Morgan to treat its client of
20-plus years. Not surprisingly, Cablevision has sued J.P. Morgan, and
Rakoff's ruling for now means that the loan can't be transferred;
further hearings will take place later this year.

This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world's largest banks,
a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants. Under any
other circumstances, the business section of the Times would be expected
to cover it, as the Journal and Bloomberg have. Yet as of Saturday
midday, I cannot find a single mention of any aspect of this case,
anywhere in the physical New York Times, or on its Web site--not even a
blog post or a wire story. Perhaps as the lawsuit moves on, the Times
will be compelled to cover it. But for the moment, it certainly appears
that Carlos Slim's investment has bought the silence of one of the
world's most important newspapers.

     * James Ledbetter is editor of The Big Money, and of The Great
Depression: A Diary, published recently by Public Affairs.

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