‘We’re Not Bandits,’ Pickens Asserts

T. Boone Pickens, the oil maverick who has tried to engineer several hostile corporate takeovers, said Saturday that the key to his attempts has been that his targets’ stock was undervalued.

“We’re not bandits,” Pickens told a United Press International regional meeting of editors. “I’ve never ‘greenmailed’ a deal in my life. I don’t believe I’m greedy.”

Pickens, who founded the Mesa Petroleum Co. of Amarillo, and others have been criticized for promoting their so-called get-rich-quick schemes at the expense of the health of the companies they target.

“There’s no doubt about it; I’ve got a problem,” Pickens said when asked about criticism of the profits he has pocketed in Mesa’s takeover attempts of such oil giants as Phillips Petroleum and Unocal.

“The numbers are large,” but so is the amount put up for stock in these deals, he said.

The “merger mania” that is worrying corporate executives is keyed to undervalued stock, he said.

Managers of some corporations are vulnerable because they have become complacent, paying more attention to “their jobs, the fishing camps, the hunting lodges that are so dear to them” than to producing more profits for their stockholders.

“It’s almost ludicrous the way stockholders are being treated,” he said. “There are 42 million stockholders in America today. There’s a constituency here that someone’s liable to put together someday.”

He said stockholders have benefited from every one of his takeover bids, including the hostile takeover attempts at Gulf Oil and Phillips Petroleum.