Denver oilman and philanthropist Tim Marquez offered Monday to buy back his company, Venoco Inc., for $383 million.
The news sent Venoco’s shares up $2.78, or 31 percent, to close at $11.76, under Marquez’s offer of $12.50 per share. The offer also drew criticism from some analysts as too low to succeed.
Four law firms quickly jumped in, announcing “investigations” that could result in shareholder lawsuits.
Venoco’s shares exceeded $22 in February but slid to a low of $8.42 last week. Falling oil prices, combined with disappointing production from some of Venoco’s holdings, have pushed the stock down.
“The offer represents a premium of 39 percent over the company’s most recent closing stock price on Aug. 26, 2011, and a 27 percent premium to the average closing price in August,” Marquez wrote in a letter to Venoco’s board of directors.
Venoco said the board would form a special committee of independent directors, not including Marquez, to consider the nonbinding proposal.
Marquez told the company that his offer is contingent on his obtaining financing and that he’s confident he can do so.
Marquez is at least the third chief executive of a U.S. oil-and-natural-gas company to propose a buyout in the past year, Bloomberg reported. Both of the previous proposals, at Fort Worth, Texas-based Quicksilver Resources Inc. and Exco Resources Inc. of Dallas, failed.
Analysts said Monday that Marquez’s offer could prompt another oil producer to make a higher bid.
Marquez already owns 50.3 percent of Venoco’s shares. In 2006, he spun off nearly half of the company in an initial public offering that raised $212.5 million.
After the IPO, Marquez and his wife, Bernadette, created and funded a $50 million matching-gift college scholarship program for Denver Public Schools graduates.
Marquez co-founded Venoco in 1992 and built it into one of the largest oil- and natural-gas-producing companies operating in California. But he was fired as CEO in 2002 after a dispute with his partners. He sued the company and was able to buy out the partners and regain control of the company in 2004.
