What is Lady Macbeth Strategy?

The Lady Macbeth strategy is a corporate-takeover strategy in which a company poses as a friendly alternative to the initial bidder ('white knight') to gain the trust of the target company, but then aligns itself with the unfriendly bidders, by either finding a way to get them contractually involved in the acquisition (for example a joint venture) or by accepting funding from the bidder in exchange for a majority share. The Lady Macbeth strategy gained its name from Shakespeare's famous play Macbeth, in which Lady Macbeth poses as a loyal and trustworthy subordinate of the King of Scotland, in order to aid his assassination so that her husband could replace him as king.