AT&T Inc. WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar stepped down before Discovery, Inc. completed the acquisition of WarnerMedia, Variety reports. The transaction will be complete on April 11. The departure was likely as Discovery chief David Zaslav looked to run the combined company, Warner Bros. Discovery. Kilar became the CEO of WarnerMedia in April 2020, just as it looked…

Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck Inc. looks to go public in the U.S. via a special purpose acquisition company merger with Thunder Bridge Capital Partners IV Inc. in a $1.25 billion deal. The transaction also includes an earn-out of up to 50 million shares. The deal would provide proceeds of $237 million to the combined company. The combined entity…

CHICAGO—Budget carriers Frontier Group Holdings and Spirit Airlines Inc on Monday unveiled plans to create the fifth-largest U.S. airline in a $2.9 billion tie-up likely to tighten competition against traditional carriers. The proposal to form a new no-frills carrier controlled by Frontier Airlines pushed up shares of Spirit as much as 18.7 percent, though several…

Special purpose acquisition company Pioneer Merger Corp. and investing app Acorns Grow have mutually terminated their $2.2 billion merger agreement, according to a regulatory filing on Tuesday. The deal, announced in May last year, was originally expected to close in the second half of 2021 and the Irvine, California-based company was to be listed on…

WASHINGTON—U.S. antitrust enforcers announced plans on Tuesday to rewrite merger guidelines in order to better fight illegal deals. The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission issued a joint statement saying U.S. industries had become increasingly concentrated and a surge in merger filings in 2020 and 2021 signaled the situation will worsen. In the statement,…

AT&T Inc. won a “favorable” ruling from the Internal Revenue Service for the planned merger of its entertainment company WarnerMedia with television conglomerate Discovery Inc. AT&T and Discovery each reported the ruling in a regulatory filing dated December 29. After announcing the deal in May, the companies began a Reverse Morris Trust, enabling AT&T and its partner to complete…

S&P Global and IHS Markit said on Monday they would sell a couple of businesses to satisfy antitrust requirements attached to the $44 billion merger of the financial information providers. S&P Global will sell securities data solutions provider CUSIP Global Services (CGS) to financial data services firm FactSet for $1.93 billion in cash, while IHS…

LONDON/HONG KONG—Global merger and acquisition (M&A) activity shattered all-time records in 2021, comfortably erasing the high-water mark that was set nearly 15 years ago, as an abundance of capital and sky-high valuations fuelled frenetic levels of dealmaking. The value of M&A globally topped $5 trillion for the first time ever, with volumes rising 63 percent…

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission said Monday that they had been notified of more than 4,000 proposed transactions between March 2020 and September 2021, sharply higher than normal. The agencies, which share the job of enforcing antitrust law, created an online portal to accept notifications of proposed transactions in March 2020, when…

Two senators have introduced bipartisan legislation that would make it harder for online tech giants to make acquisitions that “harm competition and eliminate consumer choice,” according to the office of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), one of the bill’s co-sponsors. Klobuchar and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Nov. 5 jointly announced the unveiling of the Platform…