A week after receiving an unsolicited $25.5 billion takeover bid from DISH Network, Sprint Nextel said Monday it has formed a special committee of independent directors to review and evaluate the proposal.
Shearman & Sterling is advising the special committee with a team led by New Yorkbased M&A partners Peter Lyons and Robert Katz. The firm has previously advised underwriters on multiple Sprint high-yield notes offerings, including one in November valued at $2.28 billion.
The Sprint board said last week that it would consider the DISH offer, which it must weigh against the pending sale of a 70 percent stake in the company to Japanese Internet and telecommunications group SoftBank. Sprint agreed to sell the stake to SoftBank in October in a transaction valued at $20.1 billion. Two months later, Sprint decided to put the Japanese company’s capital injection to use by agreeing to a $2.1 billion deal under which it would acquire the 49 percent stake in Clearwire it does not already own.
DISH first muddled the transaction picture for Sprint in January by making its own $3.30 per share bid for Clearwirethe seventh-largest cellular network in the United States. Englewood, Coloradobased DISH said last week that while it has not withdrawn its offer for Clearwire, it will honor the terms of the agreement between that company and Sprint. (Further complicating matters, Verizon Wireless confirmed last week that it has put in a bid of its own to buy a sizable chunk of Clearwire’s wireless spectrum, according to Reuters, though the value of that bid is unclear.)
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