accused Castlelake of trying to buy it “on the cheap”.<\/a><\/p>\nOn Sunday EasyJet’s board of directors and Castlelake said they had reached an agreement in principle on a proposal put forward on 4 July, worth \u00a36.90 per share.<\/p>\n
This does not mean a deal has been confirmed. Castlelake now needs to get regulatory clearances and the approvals required for the transaction to go ahead.<\/p>\n
One significant regulatory hurdle is that EasyJet is a European company, so by EU rules it needs to be 51% owned by a European company. <\/p>\n
Castlelake is a US firm, although it has previously outlined how it would endeavour to comply with this rule.<\/p>\n
It has until 17:00 BST on 3 August to either to announce a firm intention to make an offer or to say it does not intend to do so.<\/p>\n
If an offer is made it would need to be put to a shareholder vote.<\/p>\n
EasyJet’s board on Sunday said the financial terms of the proposed offer “are at a value that the Board would be minded to recommend to easyJet shareholders”, should a firm offer be made.<\/p>\n
EasyJet is one of Europe’s largest airlines. It employs more than 19,000 people, and flies around 1,200 routes across 35 European countries.<\/p>\n
It has previously said its share price had been “temporarily depressed” – partly due to the impact of the US-Israel war with Iran on the travel sector.<\/p>\n
EasyJet shares closed on Friday at \u00a35.58 each. Before news of the first bid emerged in June, EasyJet’s stock had fallen by more than 30% in the past year.<\/p>\n
Castlelake has assets under management worth $36bn (\u00a327.3bn). <\/p>\n
Announcing the agreement in principle, EasyJet said Castlelake had “emphasised its tremendous respect for easyJet and its people, along with its intention to support its future growth and transformation to a stronger, more resilient European airline”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EasyJet has reached an agreement in principle with a US investment firm over a potential takeover offer worth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-675497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}