Back in mid-1980s the world saw a stream of big name company executives talk up their ability to stitch together unlikely mergers, acquisitions and other deals – most of which relied on rising asset values to justify their success.

History demonstrated that markets come down as well as rise with the result being that a pile of highly-valued businesses simply came unstuck at the seams, partly because of falling prices, but also because it is always (and The Slug really does mean always) much harder to make a merger work than first appears to be the case.

Roll forward from 1987 to 2007 and we seem to be seeing the same thing again with particular focus on the Australian energy utilities market where a series of M&A deals have left even the most knowledgeable outsider (and perhaps a few insiders) shaking their heads in disbelief.

Who, The Slug asks with all sincerity, can actually explain how the asset swaps and mergers between Alinta, AGL and Origin really work?

More to the point, can anyone actually demonstrate that the shareholders of those three companies will be better off in the long run?

As far as this critic can see, there is a multi-billion game of pass-the-parcel underway with managers from the three gas and power utilities having a marvellous time in exchanging pipelines, power lines, and retail customers – all at a time when oil, coal and gas prices are falling!

Far be it for Slugcatcher to question the ability of such highly qualified people as Alinta’s Bob Browning, AGL’s Paul Anthony, or Origin’s Grant King – but can any lasting good really come from the deals that they’re doing, or are trying to do.

Alinta, for example, thought it would be interesting to swap assets with AGL and create a new business unit called Alinta Infrastructure – an operation which raised a small pile of capital, survived for little more than a year, and didn’t do a single deal before being folded up and consigned to the “lost interest” basket.

How much the merchant bankers and other advisers peeled off Alinta Infrastructure during its short life is anybody’s guess – but it hardly created a cent in additional shareholder value.

Hard on the heels of the Alinta manoeuvres we are now watching AGL and Origin consider some form of merger aimed at creating Australia’s biggest gas and electricity supplier.

Perhaps this latest deal will work – although The Slug has serious reservations. For starters there are regulatory hurdles to overcome at a trade practices (monopolies) level, not to mention individual State laws and State Governments wanting to protect consumers in their markets.

From what has been reported so far the trade practices issue is the biggest potential obstacle to AGL and Origin getting together.

But, that legalistic observation skirts lightly around another issue which a few outsiders have picked up – the question of which CEO gets to sit in the corner office. Will it be Anthony or King?

The fact that this is even raised as a potential deal-stopper is staggering.

Surely the boards of the two companies involved are not seriously jammed up on the silly question of what to do with two competing egos.

Surely the boards can see that it really doesn’t matter and that if there is the slightest whiff of CEO trouble in what is a $14 billion deal then shuffle them both to the sidelines and run in a new CEO.

It is the ego issue, more than anything else, which has The Slug deeply worried about what’s going on in the energy utilities patch – and at a few big-name oil and gas producers.

There seems to be an almost fatal fascination with finding precisely the right person to do a job which can be done by any number of competent managers.

And since when - and this is the critical question -has running a $14 billion business been the personal chore of a single person? Sure the boss is important – but not that important.

As someone famous once said: “The bigger a man’s head gets, the easier it is to fill his shoes”.