Did Apex Capital Trust Really Make a $43 Billion All-Cash Offer for Paramount? Does the Firm Even Exist?
News of the bid from a financial conglomerate circulated Wednesday, but reports were retracted as the legitimacy of the bid’s announcement came into question.
Wednesday saw one of the strangest turns yet in the Paramount Global sale saga. Just as outlets began widely reporting that former Warner Music chair Edgar Bronfman Jr. was considering a bid for the company during its 45-day “go-shop” window that’s built into its merger deal with Skydance Media, Business Wire posted a press release from a firm called Apex Capital Trust which claimed it had made a $43 billion all-cash bid to take over Paramount. That sent Paramount’s stock rising, but by late afternoon, the press release had been pulled from Business Wire’s website on grounds that the legitimacy of the bid was in question.
Key Details:
- Paramount Global has a merger deal in place with Skydance Media but is allowed to shop those deal terms for 45 days to see if it can get a better price.
- Apex is an amalgamation of financial institutions and services and promised to avoid job cuts and invest $10 billion in Paramount in the now-removed press release.
- Paramount already faces legal action over its merger deal from shareholders who say they won’t make enough from the agreement.
The news that Paramount had received a large bid came in the form of a press release posted to Business Wire, a trusted source for corporate news of this type. In it, Apex claimed to have made the whopping bid for Paramount in the name of keeping the entire company together instead of having to split off parts for sale and lay off employees to protect the bottom line.
“Paramount and its assets are a national treasure, and we intend to treat them accordingly,” Apex general counsel Tatiana Logan allegedly said in the press release. “Paramount’s global future is bright, but it requires resources, which we have and are enthusiastic to deploy, making it a win-win situation for all of Paramount’s stakeholders.”
The firm pledged to invest $10 billion to infuse Paramount with new capital, and to pay the $400 million break-up fee that Paramount would owe Skydance if the deal between the two fell through. Paramount and Skydance agreed to a two-step merger in early July, but as part of the deal agreed to a 45-day period in which Paramount could shop the terms on the open market to see if it could make more. The move was largely intended to help indemnify Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone against lawsuits from investors who say the deal helps her more than it helps them.
Paramount already faces legal action from some Class-B shareholders for this reason, and likely would have given serious consideration to the Apex offer if it were genuine. But by late afternoon, Business Wire had removed the press release from its website. Reuters pulled its story on the bid by Wednesday evening, “pending further investigation” over its legitimacy.
So far, representatives for Paramount, Skydance, and Business Wire have refused to comment publicly on the potentially false bid from Apex. Multiple news outlets reported the bid before the press release was pulled, and many have updated their stories to reflect the deal may not have been genuine. Apex might not even be a real financial institution; it doesn’t seem to have a website or internet footprint, which is odd for a conglomerate that can ostensibly afford to put together such a hefty bid.
The Paramount merger saga has had many twists and turns, but this is by far the strangest of them all. Without public acknowledgement of some kind from any of the parties involved, it is very difficult to know if Apex Capital Trust ever made a bid for Paramount Global. The company’s “go-shop” period for the Skydance merger ends on Aug. 21, and at this rate, Skydance CEO David Ellison is hoping the next three weeks go by very quickly.
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