“He said, ‘Bob, you need to get off that board. There’s something going on,’” recalled Davidson. “So we left.” Later in 1997, CUC agreed to merge with a hotel company called Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS) to form a new conglomerate called Cendant. The merger came with all sorts of weird quirks, like an arrangement for HFS boss Henry Silverman and CUC boss Walter Forbes to swap places as CEO after two years. Most alarmingly, Forbes kept his company’s financials opaque,
