C & L-Waterhouse Merger Spurs Head Honcho Speculation
The announcement of the Price Waterhouse-Coopers & Lybrand merger plan has sparked off interest and speculation as to what shape the merged organisation will take in India and who would take charge of the top jobs, i.e., the post of the chairman and the chief executive officer (CEO), in the merged entity.
This is mainly due to the fact that Coopers & Lybrand carries out its consultancy services in India through its subsidiary, Coopers & Lybrand India, while its Indian associate Lovelock & Lewis looks after audit assignments in the country. This means C&L actually has two heads overlooking the audit and consultancy services.
In such a situation, the respective heads of the three organisations namely Amal Ganguly, senior partner, Price Waterhouse (India), Shyamal Mitra, senior partner, Lovelock & Lewis and J Rajagopal, managing director, C&L India, have emerged as frontrunners for the posts of chairman and CEO.
The parent companies have decided that chairman Nicholas G Moore of C&L International will serve as chairman of the merged organisation and James J Schiro, CEO, Price Waterhouse, will take over as CEO.
A similar arrangement in India, however, will still have two contenders for the post of chairman.
Currently Price Waterhouse (India) has the highest number of partners in the country numbering 37.
Lovelock & Lewis (L&L) at present has 22 partners and Coopers & Lybrand India only two partners in the country.
The merger is subject to approval by the partners of both the firms. The two organisations have some 8,500 partners worldwide.
Since both the parent organisations have agreed that there will be no further public announcements until the partner approval process concludes later this year, speculations are rife over the issue of who will become chairman and chief executive officer of the Indian operations following the merger.
Price Waterhouse, which is still predominantly an accounting firm in India and is aggressively foraying into information technology implementation and consultancy, recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with NexGen Technology Services, a subsidiary of the California-based professional services and software manufacturer NexGen SI.
The MoU is for providing application implementation services for PeopleSofts leading edge enterprise application software suite in southeast Asia and the US final agreement will be through in a month following which NexGen will share Price Waterhouses facility at Salt Lake in Calcutta for the purpose and also send instructors.