Occidental sweetens offer for Anadarko

HOUSTON — Occidental Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: OXY) has sweetened its offer to buy Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: APC) by adding more cash to the deal. Anadarko has significant operations in Northern Colorado.

On the heels of an investment in Occidental from Berkshire Hathaway Inc, the company changed its offer from a 50 percent cash, 50 percent stock deal to an arrangement that would acquire Anadarko for $76 per share comprised of $59 in cash and 0.2934 shares of Occidental common stock per share of Anadarko common stock. Berkshire Hathaway has agreed to invest $10 billion in Occidental contingent upon the purchase of Anadarko.

BizWest previously reported that Occidental entered a superior offer to buy Anadarko in competition with an offer from Chevron Corp.

The revised proposal, which has been unanimously approved by the Occidental board of directors, represents a premium of approximately 23.3 percent to the $61.62 per share value of Chevron’s pending offer as of market close on May 3.

“We firmly believe that Occidental is uniquely positioned to drive significant value and growth from Anadarko’s highly complementary asset portfolio,” said Occidental president and CEO Vicki Hollub in a written statement. “This combination will create a global energy leader with the scale and geographic diversification to drive compelling returns to the shareholders of both companies,” she said.

“The financial support of Berkshire Hathaway as well as the agreement we announced with Total allows us to deliver our balance sheet while focusing our integration efforts on the assets that will provide the most value for us,” she said.

Occidental said Sunday that it has entered into a binding agreement to sell Anadarko’s African assets to Total S.A. (NYSE: TOT) for $8.8 billion, contingent upon completing the overall transaction with Anadarko. Anadarko has operations in Algeria, Ghana, Mozambique and South Africa.  

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