After all, to go ahead with what would have been a reverse takeover into its much larger rival would have required a £200m rights issue and debt financing of £600m, so shareholder support would have been crucial.Thus defends its decision to keep the initial approach confidential, arguing that to have gone public would have required it, under City listing rules, to have suspended its shares. Proposing a takeover bid worth more than four times Thus's market value was an audacious move. Mr Norman had turned down the conditional approach, which was not made public. Over the weekend, Mr Allan and his advisers decided to go on the attack, and on Monday morning they made the offer public, hoping - wrongly - that Energis's investors would choose it over C&W's.The announcement shocked some Thus shareholders. "If you turn this offer down, there is nowhere else to go," they warned Close Brothers, the adviser representing the rebels.Crucially, neither Close Brothers nor the Energis investors knew that Thus had tabled its own offer for Energis to the group's chairman, the former Conservative MP Archie Norman, at the end of July. C&W had announced that afternoon that its bid for its smaller rival Energis would lapse on Monday at 5pm. It would not increase its offer, despite pressure from rebel investors at Energis, it said.Earlier on Friday afternoon, Energis's management had been turning the screws on those investors holding out for a higher offer from C&W.
The shell-shocked board, and its advisers from two investment banks, Citigroup and Greenhill, gathered for a conference call at 6pm last Friday, to review the day's events. And finally, the villain of the piece - C&W, which, after all, had been stalking Energis on and off for several years - was given the moniker "cobalt". It has been a tumultuous 10 days for Thus, which was spun out of Scottish Power in 1994. The takeover plan, formed in January when advisers for Thus made their first approach to Energis, was code named "titanium". Titanium is an extremely strong and light metal, used in the manufacture of aircraft. Unfortunately for Mr Allan, Thus's eventual bid for Energis - known to insiders as "chrome" - was somewhat less robust.
If so, it probably has a metallic tang - since the code names used by Thus's advisers for the bid were taken from different metals. After his failed 11th-hour attempt to gatecrash the takeover by Cable & Wireless (C&W) of its rival Energis, Bill Allan, the chief executive of the telecoms provider Thus, could well have been left with a bitter taste in his mouth. They argue that the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) is working on a global system for emissions permits, and it would be a breach of international law for the EU to launch its own system first.Mr Dimas, though, is believed to be frustrated by the slow progress of the Montreal-based ICAO.. Others, notably the low-cost airlines such as Ryanair and easyJet, are strongly opposed.The European Low Fares Airlines Association has already published a paper opposing any changes coming out of Brussels and is planning a stronger response in coming weeks.The CE Delft report claims there is no legal reason why the EC cannot unilaterally extend emissions trading to cover flights taking off and landing at airports within the European Union.However, US and other international airlines disagree and could mount a legal fight against Brussels.
