Damn. Two of those mergers were electrical utilities and a third was gas energy. I thought mergers in those areas tended to be discouraged by governments to prevent monopolies. Interesting. Also, how the heck does buying an asset for millions of dollars and then turning around and selling it for pennies make sense? Is that some kind of Wall Street money laundering scheme or something?
Well, if you're losing $70m a year, and you've owned it for 2 years, and lost $140m, the time to sell it is right fucking now and if $1 gets it off your balance sheet, you're $70m ahead of where you'd be if you waited another year. Hyperexotic Italian marques are generally not sound financial investments to begin with and attempting to turn them into such is often quite expensive. Daimler made a small fortune out of a large one by buying Chrysler. Fiat appears to be on a similar trajectory.