REUTERS - A major shareholder
in British pay-TV company Sky (SKYB.L)
will vote against Twenty-First Century Fox's (FOXA.O)
$14 billion takeover bid, the investor told
Reuters on Sunday, while another
said it is unhappy about the offer.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox
offered 10.75 pounds ($13.52) a share in cash on Friday in its second attempt
to buy the 61 percent of the business that it does not own, with Sky's
independent directors backing the latest bid.
The shareholder,
which declined to be named but said it was one of Sky's top 50 stakeholders,
described the bid as "far too low".
"We are voting
against the deal if it comes out in its current form and we have told the
company as such," the investor said.
"The
independent directors have absolutely failed minority shareholders."
A Sky spokeswoman
declined to comment.
The deal would give
Fox control of a pay-TV network spanning 22 million households in Britain,
Ireland, Austria, Germany and Italy.
A second shareholder
told Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper that Sky's directors should push for
more.
It "ought to be
the start of the process, not the conclusion", Alastair Gunn, a fund manager
at Jupiter Asset Management, was quoted as saying.
A representative of
the firm was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters on
Sunday.
Analysts at Citi
characterized the offer as a "low-ball bid", citing 13.50 pounds per
share as a fair valuation.
Sources familiar
with the matter have told Reuters that Fox had pounced after Britain's vote to
leave the European Union in June sent the pound down about 14 percent against
the U.S. dollar and Sky's share price tumbling.
($1 = 0.7954 pounds)
REUTERS
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