The man who scuppered Unilever Kraft Heinz
It was Klein who, according to FTAV’s impeccable sources, called Warren Buffett on the Sunday after Kraft Heinz’s $143bn bid for Unilever leaked, warning the Berkshire Hathaway chairman that he was walking into a political firestorm.
Klein put Buffett on a call together with Unilever chief executive Paul Polman, and that was that.
Just one phone chat is all it took.
Why it fell to Klein to point out the bleedin’ obvious, rather than the raft of other advisers on what would have been the second largest takeover of all time, is not quite clear. The stresses around Theresa May’s government, when it comes to industrial policy and jobs, have been pretty visible — even to those based on the other side of the pond; meanwhile, parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, home of half of Unilever, have been in the diary (March 15) for some time now.
Buffett and his cold-blooded Brazilian friends at 3G, were set for a roasting on both sides of the Channel that would have lasted months — even if the fiercely-resistant stance of Unilever’s Polman had eventually softened.
Klein’s a low-profile chap, probably best known in the UK for running an informal double-act advisory operation with Tony Blair, the former British prime minster. It was the duo, for instance, who brokered a short-lived peace between Glencore’s Ivan Glasenberg and Xstrata’s Mick Davies that allowed the former to take over the latter five years ago. Now Klein’s shown he can undo big deals as well as cement them.
A former Citigroup corporate financier, he now operates in stealth mode, simply as M. Klein & Co; Blair, on the other hand, has given up galavanting around central Asia and the Middle East, turning his attention to resisting Brexit instead.