RE: Massive Rerate23 May 2019 06:14
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/profiles/8113069/Dana-Petroleum-chief-Tom-Cross-reflects-on-the-deal-of-the-decade.html
The CEO of Dana Petroleum, Tom Cross, made more than £50m when his company was sold to KNOC. In his first interview he tells Andrew Cave about the deal of the decade.
Tom Cross
By Andrew Cave
8:00AM GMT 07 Nov 2010
Tom Cross received a phone call he’ll never forget six weeks ago. It came after the announcement that he was selling Dana Petroleum, the oil company he founded 16 years ago, for £1.87bn.
“It was from a disabled pensioner in Ireland who was calling to say thank you,” he recalls. “She said: 'Dana has transformed my life’.
“She invested £400 in 1995 and was getting a cheque for £720,000. She was able to move to a new bungalow with wheelchair access and to go to Australia to see her grandchild for the first time.
“There are a lot of people whose lives you have completely changed,’ she told me. That really captured it for me. It really showed me what this means.”
“This” is the takeover by Korea National Oil Corporation (KNOC), which Dana chief executive Cross, 49, had been battling against vehemently since a £17-a-share approach arrived in June.
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With Cross refusing to open Dana’s books to the bidder or engage in exclusive talks, KNOC reluctantly lodged the first hostile bid from a state-owned national oil company in August at £18 a share – a 59pc premium to the pre-approach price.
The bid had the backing of 48pc of Dana’s investors but Cross still held out for a higher price. With the City seeing the bid as a foregone conclusion, he was criticised for adopting a “obstreperous” and “cantankerous” attitude and The Daily Telegraph’s Business Editor, Alistair Osborne, wrote that Cross was either “laughably out of touch with his shareholders or a total genius”.
Cross eventually conceded defeat when KNOC secured control of 64pc of the shares in September and the takeover has now been completed.
But in his first ever interview with a UK national newspaper, he insists that his obstinacy was simply a negotiating strategy.
“I’ve been in the oil business for 28 years,” he says. “Everybody who knows me knows I am anything but cantankerous. I am very balanced but my job was to sell the business, not to be nice to everybody.
“It’s a negotiation. You never accept the first price put on the table in any walk of life. My job was to get the best value for my 6,500 shareholders, not to roll over and say, 'tickle my tummy’.”
He certainly seems to know how to negotiate and is reaping a personal reward as he held 3m sh
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