CE Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders

I assume most readers have not taken the trouble to watch the webcast of the above mentioned meeting. It was a bit of a sad display with dissatisfied shareholders asking questions, mainly to Mr. Meysman, the chairman of the supervisory board. There were however a couple of interesting pieces of information. One is that CE internally had given itself a valuation of EUR 8.50 on a stand alone basis, which gave justification to calling the Staples offer a fair value. Another interesting fact was that Mr. Meysman mentioned that it had been impossible to get enough support for the Lyreco deal, which made it pointless to put this deal to a shareholders vote. I suspect management still doesn't like the Staples deal at all, but just had no option other than going along with it.
In the webcast the approval from the European Commission was mentioned, but also using the Staples press release as the source, like all other press did today. I still find it very strange that we have not seen a press release from the European Commission about the approval. (end of post)