Dolan Family Makes Second Bid To Take Cablevision Private
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The family who controls Cablevision Systems Corp. offered Monday to take the company private for the second time in less than two years in a deal that values the cable television operator’s total equity at $7.9 billion and implies an enterprise value of about $19.2 billion.
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times both reported on the Dolans’ plans in Monday’s editions of their papers.
The Dolans said in a statement Monday that they would offer $27 in cash for each Cablevision share. The family owns 22.5% of the company’s stock but has 74% voting power through a special class of shares.
The offer represents a 12.8% premium to Friday’s closing price of $23.93. In recent premarket activity, Cablevision shares rose past the offer price to $27.12 and hit a premarket high of $29 earlier Monday, suggesting that investors see a higher offer coming in.
The Dolans made another offer in June of last year to take the cable TV part of the company private in a deal that also would have resulted in the spinoff of a separate public company that contained several cable networks, Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the New York Knicks basketball team and the New York Rangers hockey team.
The family couldn’t reach an agreement with its board over the earlier offer and eventually dropped it last October. Under the new offer, the family would take the entire company private and also assume $11.3 billion in debt.
