Chinese Buy London Metal Exchange in £1.4bn Takeover
June 16th, 2012Via: Independent:
One of Britain’s last great independent financial markets has agreed to sell itself to China.
The 137-year-old London Metal Exchange has agreed a £1.4bn takeover from Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) after a nine-month auction process which saw bids from InterContinental Exchange, CME Group and NYSE Nasdaq.
The deal will mean massive windfalls for the LME’s largest shareholders, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Metdist, the metal brokerage owned by the LME’s former chairman Raj Bagri’s family.
The deal will pull together the LME which accounts for 80 per cent of the world’s base-metal options and futures contracts with China, which accounts for 42 per cent of the world’s metal consumption.
