Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The practice of selling shares of a company back to existing shareholders at a price substantially higher than that at which they were bought in exchange for discontinuing a hostile takeover.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Finance), Informal The act, performed by a publicly traded corporation, of paying a corporate raider to give up a takeover attempt, by buying the shares of stock he owns; also, the threat posed by corporate raiders to take over a company unless their stocks are purchased by the company at a price giving them a large profit.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Profiting from an attempted
hostile takeover by forcing the target company to buy back the hostile bidder's shares at an inflated price.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (corporation) the practice of purchasing enough shares in a firm to threaten a takeover and thereby forcing the owners to buy those shares back at a premium in order to stay in business
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Some call it "greenmail" - blackmail cloaked in green.
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Despite his denials, he has taken greenmail, which is hardly a service to the 47 million American stockholders with average incomes of $37,000 whom he claims to represent.
Creative Capitalism Michael Kinsley with Conor Clarke 2009
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Despite his denials, he has taken greenmail, which is hardly a service to the 47 million American stockholders with average incomes of $37,000 whom he claims to represent.
Creative Capitalism Michael Kinsley with Conor Clarke 2009
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Despite his denials, he has taken greenmail, which is hardly a service to the 47 million American stockholders with average incomes of $37,000 whom he claims to represent.
Creative Capitalism Michael Kinsley with Conor Clarke 2009
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The deal included the paying of "greenmail" to so called "funds" that benefit the "community" as well as the usual deals with the local unions politicians like Garcetti are beholden to.
Redevelopment Abuse? 2006
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The deal included the paying of "greenmail" to so called "funds" that benefit the "community" as well as the usual deals with the local unions politicians like Garcetti are beholden to.
Archive 2006-06-01 2006
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Such corporate restructurings, recapitalizations or mergers with "white knights," unlike the payment of "greenmail" to save managers 'jobs, are ultimately motivated by the same "straightforward economic forces" as the takeovers themselves.
Junk-Bond Finance Alcaly, Roger E. 1987
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In case you want to know why tickets and food are so expensive in the Disney Parks, you can thank these ambulance chasing lawyers whose only goal in life is to run 'greenmail' lawsuits hoping Disney will conclude that it is cheaper to write a check instead of fighting for what is right.
SplicedFeed 2010
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One of the sources likened it to "greenmail," the Wall Street term that refers to payments made to hostile investors to go away.
Boston Business News - Local Boston News | Boston Business Journal 2010
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The Sports Business Journal story, citing sources, suggested that what Kroenke was attempting in terms of a fee from Khan might be construed as "greenmail," a Wall Street term for payments made to hostile investors to go away.
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