LONDON – Frontier has asked Spirit in an email made public to adjourn the shareholders’ vote until July 27 “in order to permit additional time to solicit additional voting proxies in favor of the transaction if (…) Spirit has not received proxies representing a sufficient number of shares of Spirit common stock to vote for the approval of the proposed transaction.”
The letter
The CEO of Frontier, Barry Biffle has written in a letter to Spirit that they will not be increasing their offer, citing that their latest offer was their “last, best, and final offer.”
When the Spirit board eventually decides to go for the JetBlue deal, Biffle said that they would eventually waive its right to match the bid, saying:
“In line with our recent discussions, Frontier does not intend to propose any further modifications to the financial terms of the Merger Agreement”.
While Spirit had already postponed its vote date to the 15th, Frontier recognized that they don’t have the required shareholder support at Spirit to pass the deal.
Therefore, Frontier has asked Spirit to further postpone the vote date to July 27. This would give Frontier more support to take on the deal, with Biffle saying:
“We still remain very far from obtaining approval from Spirit stockholders based on the proxy data we received as of July 8th.”
“As has been the case throughout this process, we remain committed to this transaction. However, should the Spirit Board of Directors conclude that it would instead desire to pursue an alternative transaction with JetBlue, we would appreciate being advised of that determination.”
Optimistic
Barry Biffle remains very optimistic about the take-over, as he keeps advertising the take-over as an advantage for the board, saying “Our proposed combination is not only pro-competitive – making it possible to bring ultra-low fares to more routes in competition with larger, high-cost, high-fare airlines – our offer delivers significantly greater value to Spirit stockholders.”
Biffle keeps comparing the deal made by JetBlue and branding themselves as making a deal that would “unquestionably benefit from the Board of Directors of Spirit.”
It seems that they feel very confident in what they have offered to Spirit, yet also confirming the uncertainty they are having with the board, as if it wasn’t for Frontier, the deal would likely have been finalized months ago.
It is because Frontier acknowledges that they might be in a bad situation and are doing everything in their power to push the deal in their favor.
While it may seem like a great move, they did say that they have yet to add more people from their board to the voting day to twist the ‘seesaw’ to their favor.
