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Speaking of "put"(2)

Karen Kessler-Tanaka
Fox Family CEO Haim Saban says that he this week exercised a contractual right to force News Corp.'s Fox Broadcasting Co. unit to buy his 49.5 percent stake in Fox Family Worldwide, his so-called put option. The deal does not have a value yet, although Saban has valued it at $6 billion. Fox Family will let the bankers it hired calculate a valuation. Saban's move could hurt News Corp financially, hampering efforts to acquire DirecTV Inc. from Hughes Electronics Corp. Standard & Poor's warned that it might downgrade News Corp.'s debt rating to "negative" if the company was forced to buy Saban's stake for cash. Adding to that challenge, Hughes cut a deal Thursday to acquire digital-subscriber-line company Telocity for $179 million in cash. Hughes plans to offer DirecTV subscribers high-speed Internet access through Telocity, which would increase DirecTV's valuation for any possible sale.

Source URL (retrieved on 05/18/2013 - 3:31pm): http://www.cedmagazine.com/news/2000/12/speaking-of-%26quot%3Bput%26quot%3B%282%29