Following up on an earlier bid from July that was promptly shot down, French telecom Iliad is set to take another swing at buying T-Mobile. Rather than sweetening the price, which T-Mobile saw as too low last time around, Iliad is in discussions to simply increase the share of the company it's willing to buy. Previous deals were structured to buy up just 56.6 percent of T-Mobile, but this new deal in the works is set to be much larger.
Iliad is in loose talks with Deutsche Telekom, which owns over 66 percent of T-Mobile, about a revised deal that could take more of T-Mobile off of its hands even though the price per share may not reach DT's expected $35. On Iliad's side, the French company is in talks with financial institutions to raise as much as $5 billion more to put towards a T-Mobile buyout.
For all of the regulatory issues that previous T-Mobile buyouts ran into with AT&T and Sprint, it will be interesting to see how the government feels about this one coming from Europe instead. Iliad has put a self-imposed deadline of the end of this month to reach a preliminary agreement with Deutsche Telekom, so we shouldn't have to wait long to see some movement between these two companies.
Source: Bloomberg
