The war of words between the London Stock Exchange and OM Gruppen has escalated as the Swedish technology group reveals that 2.73 per cent of LSE shareholders are backing its hostile takeover bid.
"OM's negligible level of acceptances demonstrates that OM's inadequate offer is of little or no interest to London Stock Exchange shareholders," says LSE chairman Don Cruickshank. "It is time that OM acknowledged this and withdrew its offer. The Board of the London Stock Exchange is now determined to focus on the task of building the business."
Crucikshank's response follows OM's decision to extend the deadline for acceptance of its Offer to 10 November. Per Larsson, OM chief executive describes the LSE's technology as old and inflexible, and unable to carry the Exchange into a new era of European competition.
In response, Cruickshank questions the reliability of OM's Saxess electronic trading platform, which is currently used by the Stockholm and Copenhagen bourses: "Despite only serving two small-scale equity exchanges, OM's equity trading system, Saxess, has experienced serious reliability problems with 18 full or partial systems outages and delays since going live in April 1999. In addition, OM's exchanges have had numerous problems over the last two weeks."
He states that capacity on the LSE's Sets trading system is already over 8x the level of average total trades per day and, following a planned upgrade, will be over 16x the level of average total trades per day, providing headroom to accommodate expected continuing growth in market volumes
Crucikshank says the platform will be further developed to support initiatives for the retail community, a pan-European trading market and trading in products other than cash equities.