Here’s a curiosity - an apparent request from Oracle to the Russian antitrust authorities to withdraw the competition filing for its $7.4bn takeover of Sun.
News of this appears to have sparked a sudden widening of the spread between Sun shares and the Oracle offer terms, which opened at 14.7 per cent on Thursday and then quickly moved out to 17.8 per cent before coming back in a bit. That’s bid arbs taking evasive action, we guess.
But look very carefully at this alleged filing (our translation). Scroll down to the bottom. It is announcing that the FAS has granted Oracle’s request tomorrow — on October 30.
Oct 29–A request from the Oracle Corporation came to the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia regarding the recall of submission Number 33986 from August 4 2009 about the receipt of agreement on acquisition rights, used to determine the terms of the actualization of the business activities of Sun Microsystems St Petersburg, Sun Microsystems and MySQL without the pronouncement.
Oct 30– FAS satisfied the request in question.
Now, the Oracle-Sun deal is certainly snagged in Brussels as Oracle awaits a ruling from the European Union competition commission. So there are reasons for the arbs to be on tenterhooks.
We asked Oracle to get back to us on the matter, but the company hadn’t done so by pixel time.
A spokesman for FAS said the filing was real, but refused to be drawn on the specifics — such as the dodgy date.
So we are left feeling rather anxious over whether this is just a small mix up, or a rather elaborate hoax.
Of course, either way, withdrawing a competition filing from Russia might not signal that the Sun deal is about to unravel. Oracle might have felt it no longer needed regulatory approval on the deal in Russia for whatever reason. And it might have withdrawn the application with a view to re-submitting it.
Whatever the case, there are bound to be some very nervous investors out there.
(reporting by Miles Johnson and Courtney Weaver)
Related links:
Oracle’s Sun deal snagged in Brussels - FT
