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 Mahon Limited, Overseas Nominees Limited and subsidiaries of Credit Suisse. Its subsidiaries and offshoots included Guinness Peat Aviation and Guinness Peat Group in New Zealand and Guinness Flight Hambro, which became Investec Guinness Flight. Guinness Mahon Guinness Mahon was an Irish merchant bank originally based in Dublin but more recently with operations in London. The firm was founded as a land agency in Dublin in 1836 by barrister Robert Rundell Guinness, a great-nephew of the brewer Arthur Guinness, and John Ross Mahon, an estate agent. A London office opened in 1873, closed in 1916 during World War I and then re-opened