On Monday David Baazov, CEO of Amaya Inc, gave a speech about a plan to repurchase share in order to get 100% control over the company, which owns PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.
According to Baazov, he concluded a partnership agreement with a group of unnamed investors who offer an all-cash purchase to receive all rights of ownership of Amaya for C$21 ($ 14.98) per share. Such deal will bring approximately 40% premium to Friday’s closing price of Amaya Inc. on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Baazov already bought 24.6 million common shares of the company, which is approximately 18.6% of the total, and has an option to buy another 550,000 shares.
On Monday trading, there was an opinion that the offer of C$21 per share is cheap. The cost of Amaya’s shares increased to $19, which is over 27%, and later it went down to $18. Was made a decision to create a group of experts who will evaluate the proposal that Baazov made along with any other similar offer. However, as it was interpreted, there are no guarantees that this proposal will be considered as a formal bid.
Amaya received an offer after less than two years since Baazov bought Full Tilt and PokerStars for $4.9 billion. Now the company developed a new plan, according to which they’re going to create a Daily Fantasy Sports platform, launch an online casino which will offer sports betting, and a full reformatting of Poker Stars’ VIP system. The time frame for implementation of this strategy wasn’t called, but Amaya plans to finish it during the first half of the year.
Amaya was a small and unknown company until they purchased PokerStars and Full Tilt in June 2014. Along with that, the company owns platforms like BetStars, StarsDraft, and others. After this big takeover, the company’s name became famous in the gambling industry, and countless news reports about it don’t go off TV screens. However, such actions from the side of Amaya’s CEO and CFO attracted the attention of many Canadian authorities which caused the biggest known insider-trading investigation in Canada. It was stated that such interest in Daniel Sebag (CFO) and Baazov (CEO) has nothing to do with the personal trading.