Word: tbs
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Time Warner, the owner of Home Box Office, Cinemax and the nation's second largest cable system, and Turner, which controls CNN, TNT, the Cartoon Network and TBS, remain publicly confident that the deal will ultimately be approved. If the commission should require either the sale of certain Time Warner or Turner assets or other major changes in the deal, then the merger could be in trouble--in no small part because Tele-Communications Inc., the nation's largest cable operator and an important Turner shareholder, retains the right to veto any changes it deems not in its own interests...
...this is a natural outgrowth of the TIME/CNN poll and CNN's treatment of TIME's Man of the Year," notes Time Inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine. "But it is also very much in the spirit of what Time Warner and TBS (parent of CNN) were seeking when we signed the definitive agreement to merge last fall...
...served. But by 9 p.m. the directors needed a break. Reconvening at 7 a.m. on Friday, they finally moved to a vote after 8 a.m., little more than an hour before Wall Street opened for business. By a vote of 6 to 0 (nine abstained) the deal was approved. TBS would allow itself to be purchased by Time Warner. At that, Turner jumped up from his chair and exchanged high-fives with several directors, and the boardroom broke into spontaneous applause...
...insisting that Time Warner do away with its "poison pill" takeover defense, then by demanding seats on the board--until he had squeezed all the juice he could from the deal. "The speculation is laughable," he says. Malone still came up with a great package: He'll swap tbs stock for Time Warner stock (his share of the total: about 9%) at a higher exchange rate than most other investors and sign a new "carriage agreement" with Time Warner that locks in discount programming for his cable system through...
Malone, a notoriously hard bargainer, has a large say in the deal since he could become one of the largest shareholders of Time Warner by virtue of his stake in TBS. One reason he may support it is that it increases the value of his company's investment in tbs by $670 million. But he may also want a sweetener. "Malone is a genuine genius,'' says Tom Southwick, pub lisher of Denver-based Cable World magazine. "His frictionless mind will find a way to make this work to satisfy his own shareholders.'' He is bargaining, for example, to ensure that...