Comment: lessons from a tragic tale

It was an unusual phone call. One Sunday last month, a Kuwaiti, to whom I had never spoken before, introduced himself as Hazem to alert me to an “important story”. A company known as Arabian Peninsula Group was about to take over Harman International, an audio systems company listed on the S&P 500, he said. He had seen an article in a Kuwaiti newspaper and thought we should be aware of the “deal”.

An e-mail from an unknown source had already dropped into my inbox with similar information, littered with grammatical mistakes. It described APG as “one of the Gulf’s large privately owned Conglomerate” and said it was going to make the transaction “throw a public tender offer”.

But an internet search for APG revealed no record of the company. Yet Hazem called again, saying the business was owned by a Saudi family with Emirati partners and had assets of about $25bn.