RBS funds Cadbury takeover
chocks away! | 01.04.2010 13:23 | Globalisation
It's hardly Tar-Sands, but still shows the ruthlessness of RBS.
I hope some (ex) employees of Cadbury comment on this article to fill in the gaps.
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Now the curious case of how RBS helped finance the takeover of a British company, and the export of British jobs to Poland.
Kraft foods, a US company, used money supplied by RBS, a British bank, to buy up Cadbury, a British institution chocolate maker. Now Kraft is closing down many of its British factories to transfer the jobs to Poland and elsewhere.
Cadbury was founded by John Cadbury, a Quaker, who set out to use the profits from his business, to give his workers good working conditions, decent housing and education, against a backdrop of the 'dark Satanic mills' of Victorian Britain.
Then in 1962, the Cadbury family floated the business on the stock market, transferring responsibility for the workforce to market forces. In 2009, Kraft, already carrying massive debts, saw a killing to be made, and made a successful takeover bid for Cadbury, borrowing money from RBS to do so.
During the buy out, Kraft promised to keep factories in Britain going, indeed, without this promise their takeover bid would probably have failed. But they lied of course, truth is the first casualty of war and profit-making.
So without help from RBS, 60% owned by British taxpayers, Cadbury would still be British owned and the workers would still be able to make aliving and be treated like human beings. Instead they find themselves on the scrapheap, uneconomic labour units no longer needed to fund the avarice of shareholders.
The original 'enlightened capitalism' model is now over with the takeover of Cadbury by Kraft. leaving only the dead hand of the market to decide who works and who doesn't, who lives and who dies.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/markets/article.html?in_article_id=493713&in_page_id=3
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/791b7f1c-0792-11df-915f-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=da5b2be8-9c6b-11de-ab58-00144feabdc0.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8492572.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/30/kraft-irene-rosenfeld-payrise-cadbury
chocks away!
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