Computer Sciences Plans Unusual Takeover Defense
Computer Sciences Corp. is fashioning what may emerge as the year’s most innovative defense against a hostile takeover attempt: Beat it, we’re too highly classified.
Lawyers for El Segundo-based CSC, which does a large amount of top-secret computer work for the CIA and other federal agencies, are combing through public records around the world for information on Computer Associates International Inc., an Islandia, N.Y.-based software firm that has launched a $9.8-billion offer to buy CSC. What they find may upset Computer Associates’ acquisition plans, legal experts and industry officials said.
Computer Associates’ securities filings say 23% of the company is owned by a Swiss billionaire, Walter Haefner. That could raise concerns among U.S. intelligence officials, who usually are leery of any foreign involvement in their work, government and industry officials said.
This is the first case among many recent defense and intelligence-related mergers in which an acquiring company with relatively little experience in the classified world has tried to buy a firm embedded in that secretive, closed environment, industry officials said.
Sources close to CSC--which has a work force in this region of 7,300 people, many of whom perform extremely classified computer integration work for agencies such as the National Security Agency and the CIA--said the company plans to raise questions about Computer Associates’ ties to foreigners, its lack of classified experience and its record of creating tumult in companies it acquires.
