SunTrust Banks Starts Old-Fashioned Proxy Battle for Wachovia.

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, May, 2001

By Barry Flynn, The Orlando Sentinel, Fla. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

May 15--It was supposed to be a marriage made in heaven: Two white-glove banks sharing a genteel, Southern sensibility would join up to reassert themselves as a front-rank power in the region.

Now SunTrust Banks Inc. -- spurned by Wachovia Corp. in a polite bid late last year -- is resorting to unaccustomed, more brutish tactics to break up Wachovia's planned merger with First Union Corp.

Initiating an old-fashioned proxy battle -- a rarity these days, especially among banks -- SunTrust announced on Monday that it was offering "a substantially better deal" to Wachovia shareholders than the First Union bid that Wachovia management and directors embraced a month...

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