Yahoo rejects Microsoft “take it or leave it” proposal
SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it” proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.
As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft packaged its latest offer by activist investor Carl Icahn, a billionaire who is seeking to conquer Yahoo’s board of directors in a shareholder meeting scheduled in spite of Aug. 1.
Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an earlier bid to purchase the company’s search engine and proposed turning over the remaining pieces to a board controlled through the agency of Icahn.
Yahoo said it received the complex proposal Friday and was given less than 24 hours to respond.
Backed into a corner, Yahoo lashed at a loss in a blunt manner likely to inject even further bad blood into its already venomous relationship with Microsoft and Icahn.
“It is odd to think that our board could accept like a proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While this stamp of roving and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have get to to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the most profitably interests of our stockholders.”
Microsoft did not immediately rejoin to a request for comment late Saturday. Efforts to reach Icahn were in vain.
Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to take a bribe for the whole company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per parcel out — a order that the software maker dangled in early May in the van of withdrawing it in a pique athwart Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s demand for $37 by means of share.
The breakdown of those takeover negotiations infuriated many Yahoo shareholders who fear the company’s stock price would plunge back below $20 — a threshold reached just before Microsoft made its initial bid in early January. Yahoo shares finished Friday at $23.57.
Yahoo’s squandered opportunity to sell to Microsoft in May prompted Icahn to lead a rebellion aimed at removing Yahoo’s undivided board so he could fire Yang and try to revive sales talks with Microsoft.
Icahn’s attempted coup gathered more steam earlier this week when Microsoft publicly announced it might be nothing loath to buy all or part of Yahoo if shareholders voted to change place the current board. Yahoo shares climbed 10 percent for the period of the bygone time week on hopes that Microsoft’s backing of Icahn might pave the way for a deal.
Since it dropped its bid to buy all of Yahoo, Microsoft had focused its overtures on Yahoo’s search engine — the second in the greatest degree used in continuance the Internet behind Google Inc.’s.
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