Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [72]
Dixon and Gregg shook their heads in disbelief, made some calls, finished their drinks and went home. At 8.55 pm the Airline Partners Australia consortium put out a statement: ‘It appears that acceptances have not reached the 50 per cent level required to extend the offer. If this is confirmed, APA’s offer for Qantas Airways Ltd will not proceed. APA wishes Qantas every success.’24 The Macquarie Bank team, including lawyers from Mallesons Stephen Jaques, started drinking at The Senate beneath Macquarie Bank’s slick Martin Place offices in Sydney’s CBD. Then the unthinkable happened: word came in that Hoffman had called with an acceptance of half of billionaire Heyman’s shares – enough to take the deal to 50.6 per cent.
But hadn’t the full-time whistle already been blown? The team rushed back to start looking at the figures. At midnight the consortium put in an appeal to the Takeovers Panel to include the late acceptance by Heyman.
The Qantas board held an emergency meeting on Saturday morning. At the same time the Heyman spokesman, Hoffman, read a statement to a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald from his office in New York. ‘While we have consistently indicated to advisors that this has always been a close call for us, we are hopeful that our tender will facilitate the successful completion of the transaction.’25 They all held their breath.
At 3 pm on Sunday the Takeovers Panel rejected the appeal, saying Heyman should ‘have been well aware of the closing time and date for the offer’.26 The consortium sought a review of that decision 30 minutes later but were trumped by Qantas which, at 8.30 pm on Sunday night, put out a statement saying the deal was dead.
Monday morning ushered in a new week and a new take on the old deal. The consortium said it was considering a number of alternatives and the possibility of a fresh $5.45 a share offer. Its lawyers were looking at clause 7.3 of the bid terms, which said that anyone who accepted with part of their shares was deemed to have accepted with all of them, which would have meant the APA had more than the 50 per cent it needed on Friday night. Senator Barnaby Joyce was damning. ‘If they are relying on that clause, they should have been open about that prior to the acceptance deadline. Just like someone who got 49 out of 100 in an exam, they failed. To try and rely on this other thing now is just sneaky.’27 Qantas called for a halt in trading on its shares and raised the question of the clause, suggesting the bid may have succeeded after all. But feeling against the ‘Gordon Gecko type characters’ behind the bid was hardening.
Very little had been seen of the consortium members since the announcement months before, leaving a sense of something mysterious and sinister about the Texan buyers behind it all. Treasurer Peter Costello said: ‘This is a message from the shareholders that a majority of the shareholders did not want to accept that offer as it was put within the time limit. If anyone wants to start a new bid, the whole thing starts again. Everything starts again.’28 APA certainly did not want to go through the whole thing again. Australian Shareholders Association deputy chairman Stephen Matthews said: ‘Given what’s happened and what’s planned with regard to the [proposed debt] gearing of Qantas, their revelation that they are only interested in financially engineering the balance sheet rather than running an airline, I wonder if [Foreign Investment Review Board] approval might take longer this time around.’29
APA had had enough. On Tuesday morning it threw in the towel. A statement said: ‘APA believes that Qantas shareholders need more certainty and, accordingly, it has determined that its bid should be treated as having lapsed on 4 May 2007.’30 The deal really was dead and an awful lot of money had been wasted.
Time would show that Qantas had had a very lucky escape. News of the collapse of the deal was greeted with howls of outrage and calls for the resignation of the woman