It’s not quite the 2005 Ashes, but well played, the board of Rightmove. REA Group, the would-be bidder majority-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, is slinking back to Melbourne with its tail between its legs. A retreat wasn’t the way to bet on day one, but humiliation for the Murdoch vision of creating a multi-hemisphere property portal can be explained easily: REA never offered a decent price. Rightmove was within its rights to say no four times, even to £6.2bn.
That is the context in which to view REA’s sour grumbles about a lack of “meaningful” engagement from the target’s board. What the Australian group ignores is that a defending company is not obliged to open its books to a possible future competitor unless the offer is in whiz-bang territory.
