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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. A172A:"Page 439, line 40, leave out sub-paragraph (6)." The noble Lord said: With this amendment we are still in the depths of Schedule 3. These subsections deal with when shares that a bidder has acquired are to be treated as shares,"““to which the offer relates””." It is important for the correct treatment to be applied because this determines how many shares the bidder must gain acceptances for in order to be able to reach the threshold which enables the squeeze-out procedure to be operated. It is not clear from the words,"““the date of the offer””," whether shares bought on a market immediately before the bidder’s original announcement of its offer—known as a Rule 2.5 announcement—can be treated as ones to which the offer relates, despite the fact that the shares have not been acquired by virtue of acceptance of the offer. We therefore tabled the amendment, which would leave out subsection (6) on page 439 of the Bill, as a probing amendment to enable the Minister to let us know the Government’s intentions. I beg to move.