Don Roberts didn’t force the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange to tear its shares from his hands.
He happily voted in favour of the deal that will likely see the Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE) take over the WCE for $50 million.
“I think they did a decent job,” said Roberts, a grain merchant and commodity market analyst, speaking about WCE’s attempts to find a buyer for the exchange in which he is a shareholder.
“When it went electronic I didn’t even think there was a value for my share.”
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There is a distant chance that another company could make a trumping bid for the WCE before the deal with ICE closes, but most consider that unlikely.
Roberts said the price for the WCE is roughly equivalent to seats sold on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, and that’s an exchange with physical assets, unlike Winnipeg.
“Really there’s nothing there, just an electronic platform,” said Roberts.
Exchange chief executive officer Mike Gagne said the ICE takeover shouldn’t change much for its users. The exchange will remain in Winnipeg and offer the same contracts.
Around the end of 2007 it will drop the present Chicago Board of Trade electronic trading platform and pick up the ICE platform. But even if the WCE had remained independent, the platform would not have remained CBOT. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has taken over the CBOT, and the former’s platform is taking over all the trade.
“It should be fairly seamless for our products,” said Gagne about the shift to the ICE platform. “We’ve all done the shift before.”
The board of directors will also change. Beacuse there will be only one owner, all the directors will be nominated by ICE.
The Manitoba Securities Commission has already approved the takeover.
