Guinness led to a scandal and criminal trial concerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case "Guinness plc v Saunders", in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid. In the 1980s, as the IRA's bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the harp as its logo. The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo.
Guinness beer, allowed to stand a minute, and then topped up with beer from a cask that had been pouring longer and had calmed down a bit. With the move to gas dispense in the 1960s, it was felt important to keep the 2 stage pour ritual, in order to bring better customer acceptance of the new process. What Diageo calls the "perfect pint" of Draught Guinness is the product of a "double pour", which according to the company should take 119.5 seconds. Guinness has promoted this wait with advertising campaigns such as "good things come to those who wait". Despite