The Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos has called it a day, withdrawing her bid for Portugal Telecom SGPS after the Securities and Exchange Commission said that she had to increase her €1.35 per share offer, and PT's board made clear its preference for the French Altice group’s offer.
A spokesman for the Angolan billionaire announced that the dos Santos company Terra Peregrin will withdraw from the takeover bid for Portugal Telecom SGPS noting also that the PT board had opposed its approach.
Isabel dos Santos already has accused PT of spreading false information to the market to undermine her offer, relaying her anger through her spokesman "We wonder about the less than transparent interests that led the administration of PT SGPS to oppose our tender offer, including the dissemination of demonstrably false information."
The regulator countered the dos Santos bid by saying that it needed to be raised from the 6 month share price average to €1.94 per share. Her lower bid was, at the time, a 27% premium on the share price which had dropped sharply due to the default of Rioforte which failed to repay around €900 million that it had borrowed from PT.
Dos Santos is not used to being thwarted and let it be known that history will unveil the motivations of the PT board who hindered her offer and that her bid was coupled with an undertaking to the company serving a Portuguese speaking customer base.
The spokesman continued, "We used maximum transparency in this offer and always said that it constituted a means to achieve the goal of creating a multinational Lusophone telecommunications operator. We are determined to pursue this strategy so we will continue to examine alternatives to the investment that we had hoped for in Portugal Telecom SGPS."
Isabel dos Santos is immeasurably rich and now she is angry, a dangerous combination.
The shares of PT SGPS dropped back nearly 3% on confirmation of the news that dos Santos had withdrawn.
Now trading closer to the record low the shares reached in October, at €0.98 this is way lower than her €1.35 bid price and represents the lowest level since the price crashed in October to €0.865.
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The shares of PT SGPS dropped back nearly 3% on confirmation of the news that dos Santos had withdrawn. Now trading closer to the record low the shares reached in October, at €0.98 this is way lower than her €1.35 bid price and represents the lowest level since the lows reached in October at €0.865.
Comments
Can we now expect Altice to drop its offer back down to near what Isabel dos S. was offering? Altice's excuse being that it has examined PT's books in more detail and realised it is not that healthy.
What would be interesting is for Altice to slim down PT and 'modernise its operation' (ie Anglicise it) - shedding most staff and closing most branches. Relying on a truly multilingual service.
And for Isabel dos S to bankroll say Angola Telecom to take over as the premier Lusophone telecom supplier worldwide - something that is not Altice's priority.
But then what is the point, in a global world with hundreds of spoken languages - and one business language, to have a telecoms operator focussed exclusively on another one ?