NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO – Xerox Corp. CEO John Visentin blasted his Fujifilm Holdings Corp. counterpart’s efforts to revive merger talks and warned that he doesn’t plan to renew the companies’ Asia joint venture Fuji Xerox in 2021.
Visentin, elevated to CEO after shareholders Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason won a court order blocking the companies’ $6.1 billion merger deal, said in a letter to Fujifilm Chairman Shigetaka Komori on Monday that a lawsuit by Tokyo-based Fujifilm was “nothing more than a desperate, misguided negotiating ploy to save a takeover” that has already been blocked by a judge because of the “surreptitious actions of your team.”
Visentin said Fujifilm’s own accounting problems had made its deal with Xerox impossible to complete.
“You know it, and I know it,” Visentin said. “Your expectation — as expressed to the Japanese media — that Xerox will come to Fujifilm with a new proposal for a combination transaction is simply delusional. It will not happen.”
Fujifilm responded in a statement, accusing Xerox of breaching the merger agreement by ending the deal without a legitimate reason. It dismissed Visentin’s claim that Fujifilm’s accounting problems sunk the deal as “wrong.”Visentin’s letter echoes arguments made by billionaires Icahn and Deason in their fight against the agreement, in which Norwalk, Connecticut-based Xerox would have been acquired through a joint venture that would be controlled by Fujifilm. In court, Deason had argued that former Xerox CEO Jeffery Jacobson acted without authorization to strike the deal to preserve his own job at the expense of shareholder value. read the rest here