This brings a very interesting question. I love the way you put it Albert, “buyer beware”. We have regulatory watch dogs for all kinds of industries and transactions yet it seems like corporations, especially the larger ones, are on their own when negotiating a M&A deal. Might be an opportunity for some organization to create an ethics certification for M&A. For example, the CFA Charter for financial services is very heavily weighted on ethics (and exceptionally difficult to obtain) and if you are a charter holder and found to be “unethical”, you lose your charter. If there was an M&A industry standard for Ethics that one could obtain that validates them above other people who don’t have it, it would self regulate. People work hard, pay fees etc to obtain the M&A Ethics Certification which makes them more desirable to employers and potential clients but if they are found to be unethical by regulatory standards, they lose the certification.
