How would you ever know if Alliance-Boots was a bad buy? Or a good buy? Same question applies to Clinics, Home Infusion, drugstore.com, Duane Reade or numerous other blockbuster deals that all quietly disappeared in the abyss of anonymity and utter avoidance of WAG management accountability.
The only Walgreens exec that ever "faced the music" was Jeff Rein when he butchered the Longs Drug deal and the reimbursement showdown with Tom Ryan @ CVS, thoroughly trashing the WAG S/P.
Without that lone exception, Walgreens has ceased sharing results of major and expensive strategic actions undertaken with enormous amounts of shareholders equity. I know of NO other major company of this calibre and multi-$billion market cap that has avoided most any and all reference to report to shareholders and analysts the results they achieved... except when they are vague and non-specific comments like "We did it" over programs like Rewiring whose metrics just get buffed into the financial statements.
To me, it's a little like the old "Conglomerate Scam" where all those daring entrepreneurs like Chainsaw Al Dunlop, Hank Koslowski, Bill Farley, ad nauseum kept buying up crap so the numbers could never be comped or figured out untill all those bogus empires collapsed and investors fled. Remember Fruit of the Loom, Tyco, Sunbeam...?
I think there is serious question regarding the price Walgreens paid for the 1st 45% of A-B and even more potentially serious questions that may be asked if they go forward with buying the rest. But since this is the new Walgreens, I bet those questions just get swept under the rug and anyone with the moxie to so inquire during a C/C or at a shareholders meeting will simply be avoided, cut off, banned from access to the podioum microphone or given a disingenuous, baffling response that insults the intelligence of anyone with a brain.
Why do I feel that way? Maybe because that is how Wasson and Miquelon seem to have treated anyone else that tried to ask a hard question that held them accountable for their actions. JMHO.
GLTA,
Yank
