Incitec Pivot Ltd T.IPL

What a soap opera!

[zalmonella]

PPL decides (or gets talked into) bidding $8B for IPL.  A business combination that makes some sense even though PPL has no more experience running a plastics plant than IPL does. Well, you can usually buy the expertise you need, especially if you're a $30B company with modest debt.  So lessee, that's $8B in debt or shares added to $10B debt - manageable.

So what's with this nonsense about climbing into the LNG mudpit with Haisla First Nation?  And promising to buy TMX to boot?  more than doubling the debt, no reasonable prospect of increasing earnings, perhaps 4 or 5 years to digest all this with the possibility of losses or failure of some part of the system if interest rates start to climb next year like everyone says they will?

Recall that I was fearful last year when the price was so low that someone would come along and pick the low-hanging fruit and strip the assets bare, leaving no way to recover from my underwater position.  So I was pleased when so few shareholders seemed to be willing to take BIPC up on their offer and thought that perhaps I was safe to see this through, and would wait around til Heartland came on stream next year to move along.  But if all this nonsense goes ahead, I can't see any good end to it - more than doubling debt against iffy increases in earnings? Nope. 

Hoping for more clarity sometime on exactly what's going on.