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MATTHEWS, N.C. — Family Dollar Stores Inc.’s board is unanimously urging the company’s shareholders to ignore the hostile takeover attempt by Dollar General Corp.
Family Dollar Stores Inc.’s board is unanimously urging the company’s shareholders to ignore the hostile takeover attempt by Dollar General Corp.
The board also reiterated its support on Wednesday for a buyout bid from Dollar Tree Stores Inc.
Ed Garden, a Family Dollar board member and a founding partner of New York-based investment firm Trian Fund Management LP, urged shareholders to back the Dollar Tree bid, saying it "has taken the antitrust risk off the table."
As of late July, Trian was the largest institutional holder of Family Dollar shares, with a 7.3% stake.
Trian emerged as a Family Dollar shareholder in 2011. Company founder Nelson Pelz offered up to $60 a share for the rest of the company, a bid that Family Dollar rejected. Trian was given a seat on Family Dollar’s board, but the takeover attempt failed to garner sufficient support from shareholders and was abandoned.
Family Dollar’s board has twice before rejected Dollar General’s bid, first offered in August, shortly after the company had agreed to be acquired by Chesapeake, Va.-based Dollar Tree for $74.50 per share in a combination of $59.60 cash and $14.90 in Dollar Tree stock.
Dollar General’s chairman and chief executive officer, Rick Dreiling, went hostile with his company’s bid after Family Dollar rejected a sweetened offer of $80 a share in cash and a pledge to sell or close up to 1,500 stores to satisfy regulators at the Federal Trade Commission.
Family Dollar Wednesday said it remains unconvinced that the Dollar General bid would be approved.
"There is a very real and material risk that the transaction proposed by Dollar General would fail to close, after a lengthy and disruptive review process," said Howard Levine, Family Dollar’s chairman and CEO. "Accordingly, our board has rejected Dollar General’s tender offer and reaffirmed its support of the transaction with Dollar Tree, which delivers attractive value in the form of immediate up-front cash and upside participation in a combined Dollar Tree-Family Dollar entity, as well as closing certainty."
