The sweetheart deal I speak of came from CIFIUS. You know that great American bureaucratic agency that has approved 1530 of 1531 deals over the years.
well, this is hardly a sweetheart deal because thats the way things get done and is the structure that your congress has setup, can you show preferential treatment because thats usually what a sweetheart deal means.
First, they must not have gotten much of a "sweatheart" deal, if its the same deal that 1529 of the other 1531 firms got. Sounds like they just got the SAME deal.
But you should know that the number "1530 out of 1531" is deceptive. For example, most opponents (I don't believe you are one of these) will become supporters of this deal if, say, DP World agreed to put a U.S. board in charge of the U.S. operations. If CIFIUS HAD made an objection, and DP WOrld responded with such a concession, CIFIUS would then approve the deal -- and few would complain.
That is in fact what happens many times with CIFIUS. When a company has made a commitment to buy another company, there is a lot of incentive to complete the deal, so companies will offer many concessions to overcome objections from CIFIUS and other government entities.
For example, in this case DP World has to get a court approval in England. They had opposition, so they offered to keep the P&O Board in place running operations, and to keep the P&O company in England, rather than moving those operations to Dubai. Now they are assured of approval in England (We benefit because it means our ports are still under control of the england-based company which will now be a subsidiary of DP World).
There are also cases where a company will withdraw an offer because they see impending rejection by CIFIUS, or another entity. That has happened several times in the course of CIFIUS.
Third, many deals aren't even PRESENTED because of the knowledge that CIFIUS would reject the deals. Through informal discussions with various countries, a company may find what the objections will be, and decide that concessions would make the deal unsatisfactory, so they simply don't make a bid. There is no statistics on that occurance.
So, with a process like CIFIUS, simply looking at how many final approvals are given is mostly meaningless, since it counts only ONE of the four possibilities, and discounts the nature of real world business:
1) Company finds CIFIUS wouldn't approve, so doesn't bid.
2) Company bids, sees CIFIUS will reject, can't make concessions, and withdraws the bid before CIFIUS rejects.
3) Company bids, CIFIUS sends objections, company corrects objections, CIFIUS approves.
4) Company bids, CIFIUS sees no objections, approves.
In the DP World case, this is at least their 2nd time through CIFIUS, so even if they didn't make concessions this time, it could be they did so last time. In any case having been approved before would make it easier to be approved again.