- Thursday morning saw the announcement of Mastercard’s intention to acquire the UK’s DataCash Group. The acquisition is to be conducted via a scheme of arrangement and will offer the shareholders of DataCash a cash consideration of GBP 3.60 per share. This represents a 53.8% premium to the GBP 2.34 closing price previous to the announcement. Mastercard later announced it had received irrevocable undertakings of 52%.
- Thursday also saw Dimension Data/ NTT deal receive EC and Australian clearance.
- On Friday Promotora de Informaciones (Prisa) stated it had filed with the SEC for the previously announced amendment to the agreement with Liberty Acquisition Holdings.
- On Friday Morning KNOC announced terms of the offer for the entire share capital of Dana Petroleum as well as its outstanding convertible bonds. Together, the considerations value the company at around GBP 1.87bn. KNOC will offer each shareholder GBP 18 per each Dana share held, representing a premium of around 59% to the mid market close on 30 June 2010, the last day of trading before the commencement of the offer period. The bidder company stated that it had received support from 48.62% from Dana shareholders in form of letters of intent. Of this, 21.21% where held by ordinary Dana shareholders whilst a further 27.42% were by holders of long interest in Dana through CFDs.
Dana reacted to this announcement by advising its shareholders not to take any action regarding this offer. It further commented on KNOC’s statement regarding well advanced, non-public information and lack of further announcements by Dana that full results and operating update will be given on 27 August.
On Tuesday KNOC released a further statement to clarify that it did not intend to raise its current offer for the shares and convertible bonds of Dana Petroleum unless there was a rival bit, or with the recommendation of the board of Dana or in the case that Dana were to release new material information within the given time frame.
Wednesday saw the posting of the actual offer document for Dana Petroleum by KNOC. The deadline for acceptances was set as 23 September 2010.
Dana had announced the previous week (on 12 August 2010) that it did not feel it could recommend any such offer to its shareholders at the price indicated by KNOC.
- On Wednesday it was announced that the European Commission had cleared Emerson Electric Company’s acquisition of the UK’s Chloride Group. The Commission found that post-merger the company would still face a strongly and credibly competitive environment, hence it held no concerns regarding the transaction.
- This morning Novartis announced that is had completed its acquisition of the 77% majority ownership in Alcon through its purchase of Nestlé's 52% stake in the company. As previously stated, Novartis still intends to offer to acquire the remaining 23% of Alcon currently held by minority shareholders. The full merger of the two companies would be conducted by under Swiss law at a fixed exchange rate of 2.8 Novartis share for each Alcon share held.
dealReporter Risk Arbitrage Weekly Overview 19 August 2010 - 26 August 2010
26/08/2010
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