EXOR Refuses to Sweeten $6.eight Billion provide to gather PartnerRe

EXOR SpA, the funding car of Italy’s Agnelli own family, reiterated that it won’t sweeten a $6.eight billion offer to buy PartnerRe Ltd. because the reinsurer needs a higher rate to desert a merger deal with AXIS Capital Holdings Ltd.

EXOR doesn’t see regulatory chance inside the deal and is devoted to obtaining approvals, the Turin, Italy-primarily based enterprise stated Thursday in a statement. It offered to negotiate, however no longer on fee, handiest “to provide PartnerRe shareholders with stepped forward remaining fact.”

PartnerRe stated it'd have interaction in discussions with EXOR and is searching out a better offer, according to a assertion from the Bermuda-primarily based company on Wednesday. A takeover would thwart the deliberate merger with AXIS, which become announced in January. EXOR has made two unsolicited bids to kill that deal, and said final week that its cutting-edge provide, which values PartnerRe at $137.50 a percentage, changed into final.

“EXOR will now not recollect growing the charge of its binding offer or converting the deal-protection terms,” EXOR chief govt Officer John Elkann wrote in a letter to PartnerRe’s board. He urged PartnerRe to agenda a meeting of shareholders to vote on the offer.

The EXOR deal might provide “more truth to PartnerRe’s more than 1,000 employees whose morale has, no question, been negatively suffering from the anticipated ‘redundancies’ pondered within the present AXIS transaction,” Elkann wrote.

AXIS stated a merger would keep expenses and permit investors to benefit from a varied insurer. underneath its settlement, PartnerRe shareholders might be entitled to about 51.five percent of a blended company. A revised AXIS deal, made after EXOR’s first bid in April, values PartnerRe at about $126 a percentage, based on Bermuda-primarily based AXIS’ may 1 remaining price of $fifty two.33.

A address EXOR would bring about a $280 million termination charge to AXIS. AXIS CEO Albert Benchimol said in a letter to personnel on Wednesday that the organisation might do well even though the deal falters, and the rate might soften the blow.

EXOR is seeking to diversify past commercial businesses consisting of Fiat Chrysler automobiles NV. A PartnerRe takeover might be EXOR’s biggest in more than a century.