Hamish Champ: Not taking kindly to a takeover bid

I noted with interest last week the growing campaign in the US to block InBev's takeover bid for Anheuser-Busch.

There's no guarantee the approach will succeed. But so enraged, so rock-spittingly aggrieved are certain American patriots at the gall​ of a European-headquartered company thinking it can waltz into their backyard and wave a bucket-load of cash in the faces of shareholders that they've started petitions of every kind imaginable to ensure such an act of infamy never takes place.

Thousands of people are apparently calling for the bid to be roundly rejected, with one or two going as far as setting up a Facebook group dedicated to sending the Latino/European bid packing.

Which is a bit rich of them, if you ask me.

Just as shadow home secretary David Davis' resignation over the issue of locking up terrorist suspects for 42 days without charge gave us a bit of a laugh - er, wasn't it a Tory government that introduced internment in Northern Ireland back in 1971? - red-blooded Americans calling for a stout defence of one of their 'heritage businesses' from foreign ownership smacks of flag-draped hypocrisy.

OK, so Budweiser is a cultural icon in the Land of the Free. But c'mon, boys and girls, business is business.

It's not as if America has ever been averse to a bit of economic imperialism, now is it? Over the years US companies have gone round the world spending billions of dollars buying up stuff that the locals had hitherto regarded as their own.

Some well-known US brands are available pretty much everywhere you go in the world these days partly because people want to buy them, and partly because US brand owners had the financial muscle and political clout to get them into such markets, persuading shareholders to part with their investment for green backs.

Those a-huffin' and a-puffin' on the other side of the Pond at the prospect of a Great American Institution being owned by some darned Europeans have clearly forgotten that it works - or should work - both ways.

Back in the days when I wrote about the international music industry for a living a member of the Irish music rights body, IMRO, told me he reckoned that both the US government and business community saw the World Trade Organisation as a "stick with which to beat everyone else over the head with", one they would ignore when it came to anything likely to adversely affect their own situation.

Yes, self-interest is a part of what all governments - and businesses - are about. But everyone should play by the same rules. The US business sector - and certainly the A-B board - knows this. If the Busch family and other A-B shareholders want their jam today rather than next year, then sell they will, as Master Yoda would put it.

And anyway, even if it does persuade A-B shareholders to hand over the company for a jumbo jet-full of readies I doubt InBev would be so daft as to rip up centuries of tradition, whatever the rest of the world think of the product.

It's a shame those tens of thousands of US citizens apparently jumping and down in vein-straining fury aren't mindful of such economic - and cultural - realism…