Tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and international asset manager Brookfield have raised their bid to buy Australian energy giant AGL and fast-track the closures of its carbon-intensive coal-fired power plants greenenergy AGL
Tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and international asset manager Brookfield are threatening to walk away from their proposal to buy AGL and fast track the closure of its coal-fired power plants after the energy giant’s board rejected a sweetened bid worth nearly $9 billion.
Mr Cannon-Brookes and Brookfield’s initial cash offer, of $7.50 a share, represented a 4.7 per cent premium on the company’s closing price before the bid was announced.It also came with a promise to spend between $10 billion and $20 billion to invest in large-scale renewable energy and batteries, enabling early closures of AGL’s emissions-intensive Bayswater coal-fired power station in NSW and the Loy Yang A plant in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
“If you’re going to try to take control of a company ... then you need to go into it the way it would normally happen in the corporate world, and you pay a ‘control premium’ which typically is 30, 40, 50 per cent, depending on the circumstances, over and above what the company trades at,” Mr Hunt said.