Last week, the Delaware Court of Chancery issued its first significant appraisal decision applying the Delaware Supreme Court’s recent Dell and DFC opinions, which we’ve previously discussed here and here.
See Verition Partners Master Fund Ltd. v. Aruba Networks, Inc., C.A. No. 11448-VCL (“Aruba”). Although Dell and DFC both emphasized that deal price will often be the best evidence of fair value in appraisal actions involving open, competitive, and arm’s-length mergers of publicly traded targets, neither case involved a merger where the transaction resulted in significant synergies, which are excluded statutorily from the determination of fair value. Picking up where those cases left off, the court in Aruba, despite finding that the deal price was the product of an uncompetitive and flawed process, nonetheless found fair value to be significantly below deal price because the merger resulted in significant synergies. The court instead found fair value to be equal to the pre-announcement market trading price of the public shares, which was 30% below the deal price. Subject to any appeal from this decision, Aruba continues, and in the context of strategic mergers expands upon, the trend of substantially reducing appraisal risk for buyers of public companies.
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