Bi-weekly report on billionaires: seized yachts, board battles

The creator of the Big Brother television show is in a bidding war.
John de Mol’s investment vehicle, Talpa, had offered €273 million (Dh1.05 billion) for Telegraaf Media Group (TMG), which publishes the top-selling Dutch daily De Telegraaf and also owns Sky Radio and several leading magazine titles.
But on Monday, a group led by the Belgian publisher Mediahuis raised its earlier offer and matched Mr de Mol’s bid euro for euro.
Both bidders already hold stakes in TMG, nearly 60 per cent for Mediahuis and about 20 per cent for Talpa. This means that whichever side loses the bidding war will benefit from the higher selling price.
Mr de Mol is, of course, no stranger to gamesmanship. Over the years he has developed Big Brother and many other successful game shows, among them Fear Factor, Deal Or No Deal, Wife Swap and The Voice. Interestingly, the Talpa website includes a section called Employees, rather than where one might expect it, in a listing of the company’s executives.
Mr de Mol began his career working for radio and television broadcasters in the Netherlands. At 24 he ventured on his own as an independent television producer. In 1994 he and his business partner Joop van den Ende founded Endemol, the company that would be home to many of their biggest successes. In 2000 Telefonica of Spain bought Endemol for US$5.3 billion.
Mr de Mol tends to keep his personal live private but his son, Johnny de Mol, provided some insight late last year when he discussed Family Island, a series he is hosting in which families are brought to a deserted island to see how they cope. When asked what influences children’s behaviour, the younger de Mol said: "Most of the time it’s because of the parents. Children need consistency, stability and clear rules. As long as you are steady and form a team with your partner."
Forbes says John de Mol is worth $1.4 billion (Mr van den Ende is up there too, at $1bn).
Narayana Murthy
Narayana Murthy has called off his fight with the board of Infosys, saying he is confident that the IT giant he co-founded will deal with the concerns raised about corporate governance.
The conciliatory comments on February 13 came after the company’s founders, who still own 12.75 per cent of the group, had questioned a pay rise granted to chief executive Vishal Sikka, to $11m this year from $7.08m last year, and the size of severance payouts given to others, including up to 174m rupees (Dh9.5m) for the former finance head Rajiv Bansal.
The criticism from Mr Murthy and his fellow billionaires Nandan Nilekani and Kris Gopalakrishnan burgeoned into a public confrontation over governance at Infosys, which works for many of the world’s biggest corporations, including Goldman Sachs and Toshiba. At one point, Murthy called for a board shuffle. On February 13, though, he softened his tone, calling the Infosys chairman R Seshasayee a man of "highest integrity."
"Let me stop. I have made a point, paying such large sums of money is confusing. Now they have to sort it out," Mr Murthy said in an interview. "I felt that I don’t want it to snowball. I don’t have the time. Neither should the board and the management be spending time on it."
Infosys board members have defended Mr Sikka’s salary and said they had improved rules around severance payments since the agreement with Mr Bansal.
Mr Murthy’s wealth is estimated at $1.8bn. The son of a schoolteacher, after his university studies he founded Infosys with six colleagues in 1981 and built the outsourcing model that propelled its growth. Since their initial offering in 1993, Infosys’s shares have risen by about 40 per cent a year.

Source: The National