India's Tata Steel wins auction to buy Corus with 608 pence/shr offer - UPDATE |
|
|
|
Published
:
Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:56
|
LONDON (XFN-ASIA) - India's Tata Steel won a hotly contested bid to acquire Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus Group PLC with a 608 pence a share offer, beating the only other bidder Companhia Siderurgica Nacional PLC (CSN) of Brazil in an auction set up by the UK Takeover Panel.CSN lost the auction with a 603 pence a share offer, according to a statement from the Takeover Panel.A Corus spokeswoman said Tata's bid is worth 7 bln stg including debt.Corus' board will make a recommendation on the bids later on Wednesday, the spokeswoman said.'The final bids have been confirmed,' she said.'The board will recommend (on Wednesday), and then it will go to a shareholders vote three to four weeks after that,' she told Agence France-Presse.Corus, the UK's largest steelmaker, received an initial takeover offer from Tata last October but since then has been the subject of a takeover battle between Tata and Brazilian steel producer CSN.The UK Takeover Panel on Friday intervened in the 4.9 bln stg bid battle because it said neither company had declared their offer final.Tata upgraded its original offer of 455 pence per share to 500 pence on Dec 10, only to see CSN up its offer to 515 pence. The European Commission had cleared proposed acquisitions by both companies for Corus.The acquisition will create the world's fifth-biggest steelmaker. Corus, which was formed from the 1999 merger of Koninklijke Hoogovens NV of the Netherlands with British Steel PLC, had sales of 10.1 bln stg and about 47,300 workers worldwide in 2005.vgh/rc
|
|
|
|
Print this Story
India's Tata Steel wins auction to buy Corus with 608p/share offer 