The consortium’s initial cash offer, of $7.50 a share, had represented a 4.7 per cent premium on the company’s closing price before the bid was announced.
Justifying the board’s rejection of the initial offer, AGL chief executive Graeme Hunt last month insisted a 4.7 per cent premium was far too low, given takeover premiums often exceeded 30 per cent.
“If you’re going to try to take control of a company … then you need to go into it the way it would normally happen in the corporate world, and you pay a ‘control premium’ which typically is 30, 40, 50 per cent, depending on the circumstances, over and above what the company trades at,” Mr Hunt said.
AGL and the federal government have also argued the nation’s coal-dominated power grid was not ready to handle the bidding consortium’s proposal to close its coal-burning power stations and shift to more weather-dependent renewable energy without imperilling power supply and bills.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said the consortium’s proposal was credible, well-funded and would avoid any disruption to consumers.
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“This is not crazy futuristic technology, this is taking the technologies we have today and deploying them very pragmatically and sensibly at scale to bring that transition here as quickly as we can to bring down prices for power customers, industrial manufacturing all the way down to residential,” Mr Cannon-Brookes told The Age and the Herald last month.
“It makes total logical and economic sense.”
AGL is Australia’s heaviest source of greenhouses gases, accounting for about 8 per cent of national emissions. Under its current timelines, AGL does not intend to close its final coal-burning power station until 2045, despite the United Nations escalating pressure for developed countries to phase out the planet-heating fossil fuel from the power mix by 2030 in order to avert catastrophic levels of global warming.
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