Business - WSJ.com

Business - WSJ.com: "In Takeover Rift, Black's Argument
Outweighs Huntsmans' Rhetoric
July 9, 2008

For the past three weeks, billionaires Jon Huntsman and Leon Black have been banging heads about the fate of a $10.6 billion takeover agreement struck at 2007's lofty prices. So far, Mr. Huntsman and his son have the spicier rhetoric -- but it looks like Mr. Black's side has the stronger arguments.
[Leon Black]
Bloomberg News/Landov
Billionaires Leon Black, above, and Jon Huntsman, below, have been feuding over terms of a takeover agreement.

In their quarrel, Mr. Huntsman is the moralist. He agreed last summer to sell Huntsman Corp., the outgrowth of a little plastics company he founded nearly 40 years ago, to Hexion Specialty Chemicals Inc., controlled by Mr. Black's Apollo Management LP. The price: $28 a share, or $6.5 billion, plus about $4 billion of assumed debt. Huntsman's fortunes have stumbled since then, but even so, Mr. Huntsman wants the deal upheld.

Mr. Black's camp, by contrast, is the home of expediency. His side contends that the combined company couldn't survive the debt load originally envisioned in the deal. With Huntsman stock today at less than $11 a share, Hexion and its backers at New York-based Apollo don't want to carry out the original deal, and they haven't shown any eagerness to renegotiate terms. They"