From Asturias: Message 22497036
AN ARTIST RETURNS BY CHRIS BYRON
XCELERA IMPRESARIO VIK
MAKES A PLAY FOR VIVENDI
DARK PAST: Financier Alexander Vik (left) is trying to wrest control of French conglomerate Vivendi but he has some big market flops in his past. He is pictured with fellow Sebastian Holdings managers Amir Jahanchahi (center) and Benoit Jamar.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
May 30, 2006 -- FOR the next several weeks, the Museum of Modern Art will be exhibiting works of contemporary art donated to it in October by the noted art connoisseur and collector Edward Broida, who died of cancer last month at the age of 72.
I mention this because of a gap in the MoMA collection that the Broida donation has failed to fill.
If art is, indeed, whatever you can get away with, as Marshall McLuhan is said to have remarked, then why doesn't MoMA have on display even one measly paperweight-sized, Lexan-encased tombstone from the Wall Street stock promoter whose single late-1990s moment in the sun opened the eyes of the world to what "getting away with it" is really all about?
I call upon MoMA to do the right thing and give credit where credit is due. How about equal time for Alexander M. Vik? Can't quite place the name? That is no doubt partly because Vik has not yet produced a Wall Street oeuvre of sufficient heft to win him a Baldridge award and a book contract.
As a result, one is far more likely these days to read of Vik emerging from his Ashton Drive mansion in the hedge fund country of North Greenwich to squire around some some Czech supermodel, than to hear of his exploits at the turn of the decade, when he knocked Wall Street back on its heels.
So a retrospective on Vik's one accomplishment - the business world equivalent to hitting 300 home runs in a single seaºson - would go a long away to making amends for this oversight and bestowing upon him the recognition he deserves.
And what better time than now for MoMA to act, for after an absence of years, Vik has once again returned to Wall Street, where some say his footfalls have never stopped echoing.
We'll turn to the details of Vik's latest adventure in a minute, but first, a brief reprise of what he has given us already. After all, when it comes to the investment world art form known as "getting away with it," who among us can ever hope to match what Vik achieved as chairman and CEO of an American Stock Exchange-listed dot.com bomb called Xcelera.com.
During a barely yearlong period that climaxed in March 2000, Vik presided over what will surely go down in history as the grandest, and most completely obvious pump-and-dump performance.
IT began when Vik used his ownership of a com pany that operated a hotel in the Canary Islands to take over a worthless Swedish penny stock company that was promoting a plan for how to speed up the Internet.
Vik thereupon erupted in a geyser of grand-sounding plans that sent the shares of the merged company on a stupefying 72,000 percent rocket-ride to outer space.
At the apogee of its run up, the shares soared to more than $111 on the Amex. Xcelera's subsequent collapse wiped out an incredible $12 billion of illusory market value in the company while leaving nothing to mark its passing but the fading image of Vik's Cheshire cat smile, as insider stock sales sent roughly $425 million of that money cascading into the coffers of an offshore shell company controlled by Vik in the Turks & Caicos Islands.
When furious dissident shareholders filed suits accusing Vik of all manner of nefarious behavior as head of the company, he fought them to a standstill in court. And when the Securities and Exchange Commission began questioning the company's accounting for 2003, Xcelera simply stopped filing accounting statements.
This caused the Amex - normally the very soul of reasonableness when it comes to cutting slack for cheesy companies - to expel Xcelera from the exchange, and onto the Over The Counter market, where it has traded for the last year and a half on the so-called pink sheets, Wall Street's filthiest and most rancid gutter of all.
By any measure it was a haul for the record books, and Vik got away with it clean as a whistle. Simply put, he redefined the art form of the rip-off: He pulled a Vik.
Now he's back for more, though things have changed a lot on Wall Street since Vik was last seen in these parts, and in fairness one must say that he doesn't seem to be off to a great start as a copycat of corporate raider extraordinaire Carl Icahn.
A few months ago, Icahn had to accept defeat in his nearly yearlong campaign to take over Time Warner. The flaw in his plan: failing to realize that Time Warner belongs to the most exclusive and powerful corporate club on earth, the conglomerate media, and that an attack on one is invariably perceived by the other club members as a threat to them all, with the result that hostile bids always fail.
Now Vik is trying the same sort of thing, though in a way that calls to mind Pablo Picasso's gripe about the poseurs of the art world: "You do something, then somebody else comes along and does it pretty."
Instead of targeting A-list quarry, as Icahn did, Vik has set his sights on Paris-based Vivendi Universal Group, the only non-U.S. member of the club. And instead of a hostile bid, Vik is positioning the offer, at a reported $42 a share, or just under $50 billion for the whole company, as friendly.
EVEN so, it may not stay that way, since Viven di's brass have already dismissed the bid as unworthy of discussion, and if the offer turns hostile, Vik will find himself facing the same brick wall that Icahn confronted.
How Vik got into this jam seems to be a case of simple overreaching. He was smitten with the media takeover bug a year ago, when those in the know say an Iranian businessman named Amir Jahanchahi helped him join up with a well-known corporate raider named Vincent Bolloré to oust the CEO of France's Havas advertising agency.
Vik owns a Turks and Caicos investment vehicle called Sebastian Holdings, which he used as his front in the Havas deal. Now he is using it again, in concert with the Iranian, Jahanchahi.
It's not clear whether Sebastian Holdings' assets include any of the proceeds from those earlier sales of Xcelera shares. But if they do, Vik will certainly be hearing soon enough from lawyers representing the last remaining class-action lawsuit still active against him in the Xcelera matter. It involves a plaintiff shareholder named Alex Stuebler, who claims he was seduced by Vik's lies into investing in Xcelera in the first place.
But I say, lies, schmies!
Maybe Vik is going to fall flat on his face in his grab for glory as a media world big timer. Yet so what if he does.
On Wall Street, where "due diligence" ends the instant a person's money is seen to be green, I know of no one who doesn't secretly envy and admire Alexander Vik for the stunt he pulled off or wish that they had the guts to attempt it themselves. And why should Vik have to perform the trick twice to earn his place in history and that display case in MoMA?
Shouldn't it be enough simply to pull a Vik once?
cbyron@nypost.com |
