"It has to be legal, Mr. Walton." Noda leaned back in his chair, waiting.
"It is. But in order to lay the groundwork, we'll first need to set up a string of dummy corporations."
"Any particular state?" He was listening closely now, his mind clicking away. I was never sure what the man was thinking, but I figured he'd probably seen it all before.
"That old standby Delaware should do fine, though you might want to consider going for some offshore tax-haven places, if only because the paperwork is minimal. In the Caribbean I'd recommend the Turks and Caicos Islands, maybe the Cayman Islands. Then there's Bermuda or the Bahamas or the Channel Islands. If you really want to get esoteric, why not Vanuatu—used to be the New Hebrides—in the South Pacific."
"I'm familiar with world geography, Mr. Walton." He was deadpan. A joke?
"Fair enough. These dummy corporations of course will have no assets."
"I understand." He smiled and ran his fingers through his silver hair, doubtless already miles ahead of me. "Absolutely no problem. Please proceed."
"While those corporations are being set up, you continue buying stock in whatever companies you need to control, making sure in all cases that you acquire just enough to deliberately trigger their poison-pill mechanism. We force them to issue their flip-over bonds. They can't stop the process, since it's always set up to be automatic after a certain percentage of stock has been acquired. Not even the boards of directors can revoke it."
"Yes, Mr. Walton. I'm aware of that." He didn't seem the slightest bit ruffled by my unorthodox opener.
"Well, let me elaborate. The reason we want to trigger their poison pill first is so that nobody can later come in as a white knight and save them. They're totally isolated. They'll have made themselves into sitting ducks."