this is awesome!!! in the story it says bass pro also has to pay $55 million to terminate its offer. this is actually something good biden has done. the feds blocked the merger.
I'm not familiar with this transaction, but when I worked at big law firms I was involved in a number of large acquisitions. It's typical to build in a "break fee" in to the agreement in the event things happen prior to the deal closing, with regulatory issues being one of the big ones.
One deal I worked on involved my client acquiring a publicly traded medical insurance company and we knew that there was a high likelihood that the regulators would require some form of business unit divestment to approve the deal since both buyer and seller were in the same business with overlapping customers. Of course, the regulators did what was expected and the deal was restructured and then it closed.
It's not Biden who did this, it's a longstanding part of federal antitrust regulation of transactions. It happens all jthe time, which is why we always put break fees in to deals where both buyer and seller are in the same market space.
