no-shop or “non-solicit” clauses have long been a feature of public company merger agreements. Under basic fiduciary duty principles, in almost all instances the board of a public company that signs a sale agreement is not permitted to preclude the possibility of considering post-announcement competing proposals.
O sea, que aunque los administradores de la compañía que se vende se obliguen con un determinado oferente, han de escuchar, por lo menos, otras ofertas posteriores. Pero
The traditional merger agreement no-shop formulation has prohibited a target board from actively soliciting competing proposals, but permits a board to consider an inbound unsolicited inquiry from a potential topping bidder, with the target owing a break-up fee, usually about 3% of the deal value, in the event it terminates the first deal to accept the superior proposal.
En España, la break-up fee no supera el 1 %.
Ahora, parece que se están modificando las cláusulas contractuales y se incluye una “go-shop” que estableceHistorically, the view was that the no-shop structure, despite its prohibition on active marketing efforts, was sufficient to allow a target board to satisfy its obligation to conduct a market-check of its sale decision even in the absence of a pre-signing marketing effort.
(1) an initial post-signing period during which the target board was permitted to actively solicit competing proposals, often followed by a period where the traditional no-shop prohibitions were activated and (2) a lower break-up fee (often about half the standard fee) that applied to deals that resulted from indications of interest during the active solicitation period. While the empirical evidence from the LBO boom suggests that go-shops were remarkably unsuccessful in generating competing offers, a few Delaware court decisions, most prominently in Topps and Lear, offered judicial support for the proposition that boards selling to private equity buyers could successfully fulfill their “market-check” obligations via a go-shop even in the absence of any pre-signing auction.
No es raro que los estudios empíricos permitieran concluir que la cláusula go-shop no logró que aparecieran ofertas competidoras. No se vé por qué los administradores de una compañía que han firmado un acuerdo con otra para venderla, habrían de comportarse muy activamente en la búsqueda de ofertas competidoras, aunque no les esté prohibido hacerlo. Lo lógico, si han firmado con una determinada compañía es que lo hayan hecho después de hacer esa búsqueda o de comprobar que la oferta es lo más potable que hay en el mercado y, por tanto, que no continúen con dicha búsqueda después de la firma.
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