Roger Carr
When Mr Carr was made chairman of the newly demerged, slimmed-down Cadbury in February 2008, after it hived off its US fizzy drinks business, many believed it would be only a matter of time before the accomplished chairman would take his usual role of negotiating a sale of the rump confectionary company. And so it has transpired. He can be credited with helping drive a tough bargain, forcing Kraft’s Irene Rosenfeld to raise her offer by 14 per cent during the five-month bid battle.
The 63-year-old opera lover is also chairman of Centrica, the owner of British Gas, and a non-executive director of the Bank of England. But he established his corporate spurs in the 1980s when, together with Brian McGowan and Sir Nigel Rudd, he helped to transform Williams from a car dealership into a FTSE 100 industrial conglomerate. It was eventually split in two, with Mr Carr emerging as chairman of Chubb. The one-time chairman of Thames Water he helped to steer its successful sale to RWE of Germany.
As a board member of Bass, he was also a key figure in the company’s 2003 decision to split into its constituent pub and hotel businesses. He became chairman of the pub business Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) but was later blamed by many investors for not standing up to Robert Tchenguiz, its biggest shareholder, when a planned property deal with Mr Tchenguiz collapsed, leaving the company nursing a £391 million hedging loss. He quit in 2008.
Irene Rosenfeld
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The native New Yorker, chairman and chief executive of Kraft, has a marketing background and is one of the few women to have carved out a niche at the top of corporate America, featuring regularly in the lists of the nation’s 50 most powerful businesswomen. The long, carefully planned out acquisition battle for Cadbury’s will seal her reputation in the food industry where she has had a 25-year career.
This is her second stint at Kraft. She started her career after Cornell University at a New York advertising agency but later joined General Foods as a consumer researcher. General Foods’s parent, Philip Morris, later merged it with Kraft and when it bought Nabisco in 2000 for $18.9 billion, she was promoted to head Kraft’s North American business. Although she managed to succesfully integrate Nabisco she left along with several other key executives in July 2003 as the company stumbled, upsetting investors by missing profit forecasts as well as having a failed product launch. She was rehired as chief executive in June 2006 from Frito-Lay, PepsiCo’s snack food division.
She serves on the board of trustees of Cornell University, where she obtained a BA in psychology and a PhD in marketing and statistics. She is married and has two daughters.
Todd Stitzer
Mr Stitzer, 57, who has been Cadbury’s chief executive for nearly seven years, has worked at the company for 27 years.
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An American lawyer by training, Mr Stitzer has been critical of Kraft’s management, accusing it of “over promising and under delivering”. However, he is unlikely to agree with any government attempts to clamp down on overseas takeovers of British companies.
Mr Stitzer clearly believes in the state giving maximum freedom to industry and its leaders - his favourite book is the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, a bible for American conservative thinkers in which John Galt, the charismatic entrepreneur, leads a strike of the world’s captains of industry against control by government.
He joined Cadbury as assistant general counsel at Cadbury’s US operations in 1983 and worked his way up to be successively president and chief executive of its Dr Pepper/Seven Up US drinks arm and then in 2000 to a boardroom role as chief strategy officer for the group.
The son of a YMCA director and a nurse, Mr Stitzer grew up in Massachusetts, studied law at Harvard and is a naturalised British citizen though he and his wife and two children have homes in both Connecticut and Surrey.
Warren Buffett
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The famous “sage of Omaha” controls Berkshire Hathaway, which is the largest shareholder in Kraft and the 79-year-old publicly warned Ms Rosenfeld two weeks ago that Berkshire would vote against Kraft’s planned share issue if the company offered too many shares to buy Cadbury.
Mr Buffett is respected by his legions of private investors and feared by corporate chieftans for his criticisms of management excesses. So Ms Rosenfeld would have listened. Today’s agreed Kraft offer cuts the proportion of Kraft shares in the £11.9 billion bid from 50 to 40 per cent, though it remains to be seen whether this is enough to mollify Mr Buffett.
Ranked last year as America’s second richest man after Bill Gates with a net worth of $40 billion, Mr Buffett was said to be the world’s richest man in 2008 before he donated billions to charity and he is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth.
Bruce Wasserstein
Nicknamed “Bid ‘Em Up Bruce” for the way he managed to inflate the selling price of assets, Mr Wasserstein, the chairman and chief executive of Lazards, the investment bank, was the lead adviser to Ms Rosenfeld and Kraft on its bid for Cadbury, until he died of heart problems in October last year aged 61. He was known as one of the “barbarians of high finance” after the famous book, Barbarians at the Gate, which detailed his aggressive tactics and bruising personality in his role advising on the giant takeover of NJR Nabisco.
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He said that he continued working past the point where he needed to enrich himself because he liked what he called the “deal business”. “It’s a way to participate in change,” he added.
Born in Brooklyn in 1947 he established a fearsome reputation for himself working for First Boston, a large New York-based investment bank, in the 1980s. He quit in 1988 to co-found his own deal advisory firm, Wasserstein Perella, and from there, in 2001 to two European banks, first Dresdner and then Lazards.