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 this, Guinness has endorsed the use of "Exactap", marketed by DigitalDispense USA LLC, owned in a trust by its American inventor. The "Exactap" is the fastest beer dispense system in the world and can deliver a perfectly presented Guinness, with no overfilling, in just 4 seconds. There are over 600 "Exactaps" in use in Dublin stadia alone. The brewer currently recommends that draught Guinness should be served at 6 °C (42.8 °F), while Extra Cold Guinness should be served at 3.5 °C (38.6 °F). Prior to the 21st century it was popular to serve Guinness at cellar temperature (about 13