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 Brewery secretly promised to redeem the shares at cost, including commissions. To fulfill its end of the bargain, Guinness deposited $76 million with Bank Leu's Luxembourg subsidiary. As Distillers was worth more than Guinness plc, the Guinness family shareholding in the merged company went below 10 per cent, and today no member of the family sits on the board. Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986. The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo plc, capitalised in 2006 at about 40 billion euros. Although not officially fully taken over, the Guinness family still owns 51 per cent of