I hope you'll forgive me for not commenting on every twist and turn in the seemingly endless three-way takeover tug-of-war among fertilizer players Agrium
By Halloween, CF had dug fairly deep into its bag of takeover tricks in its pursuit of Terra, which stretches all the way back to January. In addition to begrudgingly raising the exchange ratio of its offer, CF both launched a proxy contest (Terra's annual meeting convenes two weeks from Friday) and acquired 7% of its target's shares in the open market.
What CF had not done until yesterday was offer cash as a component of its bid. As they say, money talks and, uh, other stuff walks.
OK, so I'm paraphrasing. But now that CF is dangling a majority-cash bid (to be financed with help from its financial advisor Morgan Stanley
What made this revised bid possible was the same factor that's allowed EnCana
As for Agrium's advances on CF, it was silly of me to take the former at its word when it said it would walk away if its tender offer failed back in June. Agrium has just continued to push back the expiration of its offer of $40 plus one Agrium share per CF share. As of Friday, that represented a minuscule premium of 4%. Unless it takes a cue from CF and goes big with a bigger cash bid, Agrium will likely walk out of this takeover tango without a dance partner.