Another Public Company disappears in the Maw of 'Private' Equity

In this age of growing concern about Inequality it is a slap in the face of ordinary investors - let alone citizens - if more and more public companies get gobbled up by financial engineers and their conspirators among dominant shareholders and management. Apart from the problem that benefits of the Private Equity industry are disputed - there was hardly ANY private equity to speak of before the mid-1980s and the world was doing quite well without it - the distributional effects are clear for all to see: Who else but promoters of the industry can spend millions on a birthday party? why should public companies show restraint in relation to executive compensation when promoters and their hired guns in management don't disclose their pay packets? They probably get paid amounts that would sometimes be multitudes of what senior executives in public companies can earn. It is clear that mechanisms to protect public shareholders from having their companies taken away on less than attractive terms are not up to the task. Who cares about Wider Shareownership or the Shareholder Democracy? Rome's decline started when wealth got concentrated in the hands of the few.
(5-August-2019)
Springer Buy-out on track