The Surface Transportation Board (STB), the federal regulator that will determine whether Union Pacific can acquire Norfolk Southern, has “serious concerns” that UP CEO Jim Vena’s remarks during a conference in March may have discouraged shippers from speaking freely about the proposed $85 billion deal.
The board ordered Union Pacific to release a full recording of Vena’s speech to railroad shippers, in which he made an apparent tongue-and-cheek comment about raising rates for customers that opposed the merger.
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Union Pacific released the nearly 53-minute recording on Thursday, one day after the board rejected its appeal of an administrative law judge’s order to make it public.
The recording includes Vena’s keynote at the Southwest Association of Rail Shippers conference in Houston, in which he spent most of the address making the case for a coast-to-coast single-line railroad before closing with the rate remark and walking offstage. The question now is less whether Vena meant the remark as a joke than whether shippers felt free to oppose the merger after hearing it.
“We’re going to get this done…If we don’t do that, Union Pacific will still be there. And if I stick around, which I probably will, I’ll probably increase rates for everybody that said they didn’t want a seamless railroad by three or four extra percent to teach you a lesson,” Vena said.
Union Pacific submitted the speech to the board as confidential until the judge mandated it be made public on Oct.
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