By Svea Herbst-Bayliss
BOSTON (Reuters) – Investment firms Cannae Holdings
Cannae and Senator, which jointly hold an economic interest of roughly 15% in CoreLogic, are offering $65 a share in cash and said the proposal is “well in excess of what the company can achieve under its current plans.”
The company’s stock price ended trading at $67.95 on Friday.
“We would seek to reignite growth at CoreLogic, increasing operating efficiency, and improve overall allocation of scarce capital resources,” Cannae Holding’s chief executive officer, Richard Massey, and Senator partner Quentin Koffey wrote to the board.
CoreLogic said it “will carefully review the proposal.”
Cannae last year was part of an investment group that acquired data and analytics company Dunn & Bradstreet Corp for $6.9 billion. Bill Foley, Cannae’s chairman, is also chairman of title insurer Fidelity National Financial Inc
Senator boosted its shareholder activism muscle last year by poaching Quentin Koffey from a larger hedge fund, D.E. Shaw.
Cannae and Senator said they could sign a definitive merger agreement within four weeks after seeing relevant documents. They said they had secured $3.6 billion in equity financing and were “highly confident” they would get debt from the deal “from a large national bank.”
They also warned that they were prepared to call a special shareholder meeting to challenge CoreLogic’s board if they do not get their way.
So far two sides have not had any discussions, and CoreLogic is in the process of hiring advisers to review the offer, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
Cannae and Senator also called on CoreLogic to form a special board committee to review their offer. This is because they regard this as best practice in corporate governance, rather than identifying a conflict with any of CoreLogic’s directors, one of the sources added.
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Boston; Additional reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Tom Brown and Jonathan Oatis)
