Cleary Gottlieb represented VeriSign, Inc. in the sale of its 49% share in the Jamba joint venture to majority partner News Corporation. The transaction was signed and closed on October 6.
Jamba, also known as Jamster in the United States and other countries, is one of the world’s leading providers of mobile entertainment, allowing consumers to download to their handsets music, games, videos, mobile TV, alerts, graphics and other branded or original content. The joint venture was created when News Corporation acquired a controlling interest in VeriSign’s wholly-owned Jamba subsidiary in 2007 and combined it with its Fox Mobile Entertainment unit.
The Jamba sale is part of VeriSign’s divestiture plan, which calls for the disposal of a number of non-core businesses in its portfolio in order to focus on VeriSign’s key competencies. Cleary Gottlieb teams in the Washington and New York offices are assisting VeriSign in all the contemplated divestitures.
VeriSign, a Nasdaq-listed company, operates infrastructure services that enable and protect billions of interactions every day across the world’s voice, video and data networks. After completion of is divestiture program, VeriSign’s core businesses will include Naming Services, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, and Identity and Authentication Services.
