WHEN Germany’s Dresdner Bank announced that it was buying investment-banking boutique Wasserstein Perella, for $1.369 billion (excluding retention packages), many investment bankers gasped in disbelief.
Wasserella has performed pretty well over the last year, gaining a role in the record-breaking $185 billion AOL-Time Warner merger and fired by a fifth place in U.S. M&A advisory.
Combined, Dresdner and Wasserella, perhaps optimistically, hope to outgun the new J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in M&A.
But that still did not justify the high price to many of the bankers who know the company.
One banker, whose firm looked at buying Wasserella and passed, thought that the $1 billion price tag that Bruce Wasserstein was reportedly looking for was high.
Confirmation that the Wasserstein bankers thought they had hit pay dirt recently came from a source with friends at the firm.
The source reported that one of Wasserstein friend’s mothers, who is a survivor of the World War II Nazi death camps, rang up in some alarm.
“What are you doing? You are working for the Germans?” asked the disturbed mother of her banker son.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” he replied. “We’re robbing them blind.”