RE:Current Fair Value of MurchisonMy legal advice (very highly eperienced albeit informal and from a different jurisdiction) was that fair value is the stock market price. This whole dissenting shareholder concept, forcing the company to buy back shares at fair value, exists to protect shareholders of non-liquid privately held stock, which can be difficult if not impossible to dispose of otherwise - and also for which it can be difficult to determine fair value except by a valuation process. For a publicly traded company, this dissenting shareholder principle is less relevant because shareholders can simply sell their stock on the market. Apparently, the courts consider the market to be sufficiently sophisticated to determine fair value, and in fact typically consider this to be a more authoritative price discovery process than any other method.
The lawyer I spoke to explained that the process typically looks like this:
1. A dissenting shareholder tells the company he wants his stock bought at fair value.
2. The company responds with its proposed fair value.
3. The shareholder can either agree to this price or sue the company to undertake a third-party determination of fair value.
4. In the case of a publicly held company, there exists no legal reason for the courts to choose any other valuation over the market price, so any lawsuit aimed at determining fair value any other way is unlikely to succeed.