Arcelor Mittal has won the latest rounds of a legal battle with hedge funds and other investors over the offer terms for shares in Arcelor SA it doesn’t already own. A court in Paris has thrown out a shareholders revolt against the finalization of Mittal Steel’s merger with Arcelor. A Dutch court also ruled against Dutch shareholders including hedge funds SRM Advisers and Trafalgar Asset Managers Ltd unhappy with the terms. ArcelorMittal in a release said that it has noted decisions by the District Court of Rotterdam and the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris which reject the attempts by certain minority shareholders in Arcelor to prevent the merger of the two companies based on the announced terms. And an Extraordinary General Meeting of shareholders of Mittal Steel Co. NV will be held, as previously announced, at 1400 CET on 28 August 2007, at the Hotel Okura Amsterdam in Amsterdam, to resolve on the first step in the merger process. The hedge funds had argued that ArcelorMittal’s 16 May offer for the last 6% of Arcelor was too low. When Mittal Steel bought Arcelor last year, it paid investors 11 ArcelorMittal shares for every 7 Arcelor shares and now they are offered 8 shares of the merged company for every 7 shares of Arcelor.
