Tonight, a whole lot has changed since we last reported on Friday. BTL's planned acquisition of three cable companies is D-E-D. That's after CENTAUR and CTI/NEXGEN both withdrew themselves for consideration. This came after the extreme scrutiny 7News has placed on the transaction and pressure applied by Lord Ashcroft - which we'll tell you about later.
And it all started late last night when Centaur's Jaime Briceno sent a letter to the BTL Chairman announcing that his company was withdrawing from negotiations. He says, quote, "this decision is not driven by any reassessment of the underlying business rationale or valuation considerations. Rather, it reflects our assessment of the broader external and political considerations that have emerged during the process, and the disproportionate personal and reputational burdens that continued negotiations would inevitably entail."
That was followed by CTI/NEXGEN this morning which sent a similar letter saying, quote, "this consolidation would not only provide us with fair value but also serve the best interest of BTL, its shareholders and ultimately the Belize economy." But, it continues, "having regard to recent developments including personal and reputational attacks being made in the media unrelated to the merits of the commercial terms, we have decided to withdraw from further negotiations."
So that takes those two companies off the table, and they jointly own the third, Southern Cable Network, so we can safely assume that too is off the table.
The subtraction of those three cable companies from the acquisition takes 90 million out of what the reported 170 million dollars package that BTL was looking at.
