Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [63]
Still, Kroll’s ties to Allen Stanford show the deep and hidden web of connections underlying the global private intelligence industry. Somehow, a firm that had paid so much attention to its public image in its formative years wound up working for a man known in the media as the “pirate of the Caribbean.”
CHAPTER SIX
The Chocolate War
The town of Vevey, Switzerland, is tucked between the Swiss Alps and the blue water of Lake Geneva. Famous for panoramic views of mountains and lake waters stretching to the nearby French border, the lakeside community is suffused with literary history—Henry James set his novel Daisy Miller here, and the writers Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky all called the village home at times. Today it is best known for a company that was founded here in 1866: Nestlé, the $100 billion global chocolate and food conglomerate.
Lake Geneva’s shoreline forms one border of Nestlé’s corporate compound. The office complex, which is topped by the white cross of the Swiss national flag and shaped like a double-headed letter Y, has views of the soaring mountains, the lake, and the picturesque town nearby.
On March 4, 1998, there was a hint of an early spring rain in the cloudy skies over Vevey. Inside the enormous compound, Nestlé’s chairman, Dr. Helmut Maucher, read a fax that had just come in from his fiercest corporate rival, the billionaire American candy titan Forrest E. Mars, Jr. To understand the fax, you need to know something about the competition between Nestlé and Mars. Certain corporate rivalries go beyond mere market share and quarterly results: the competing companies are locked in a struggle that’s more a grudge match than business as usual. That’s the way it was with Nestlé and Mars. Any market share gained by either one of the giants seemed to come out of the hide of the other. The rivalry spanned the globe, encompassing—among other products—packaged meals, pet food, and, most of all, chocolate candy.
That afternoon’s fax came at a delicate time for Nestlé. It had just announced a planned $1 billion takeover of the Spillers pet food business from a British company, Dalgety.1 The huge deal would give Nestlé a boost in the pet food sector, adding well-known British brands such as Choosy cat food and Bonzo dog food, which would make excellent complements to Nestlé’s existing Friskies pet food business. Along with the brands would come thirteen pet food factories, located throughout Europe.
Maucher, a German, was then seventy-one years old. His high forehead was topped by a curl of wispy graying hair, giving him a look of classic, restrained European business elegance. Earlier in the day, he’d had an angry telephone conversation with Forrest Mars’s brother, John, who was a billionaire in his own right and formed the other half of the third generation of family members to run the Mars company. During their talk, Maucher hotly voiced his concerns about Mars: The Americans were encouraging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Washington to take action against new Nestlé products. They were gathering information on Nestlé and its activities. Worst of all, they had “declared war” against Nestlé, Maucher charged. He demanded to know whether or not Mars would move to block the billion-dollar acquisition of Spillers. It was a reasonable question: the deal was a direct threat to Mars’s own pet food brands: Whiskas for cats and Pedigree for dogs.
In his two-page faxed reply, Forrest Mars said he and his brother were “flabbergasted by your statements of this morning.” He