Ontario Teachers to vote for SoftBank/Sprint deal

By Sinead Carew

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, the fifteenth biggest shareholder in Sprint Nextel Corp , said on Friday it intends to vote for SoftBank Corp's plan to buy 70 percent of Sprint for $20.1 billion.

The pension plan owned 40.2 million shares, or 1.33 percent, of Sprint, according to the latest publicly available information.

It did not provide details on its website on how it came to its decision ahead of a June 12 special meeting where shareholders are due to vote on the deal.

Several other shareholders have said, however, that they were not happy with the SoftBank deal after Dish Network made a rival $25.5 billion offer for Sprint on April 15.

Dish has been taking a closer look at Sprint's books for the last few weeks as it had said that its offer was subject to the completion of a due diligence process.

Hedge fund titan John Paulson, whose fund is the second biggest shareholder with 7.7 percent of Sprint according to public data, said in April that Dish's offer was compelling and offers more value to Sprint shareholders.

Omega Advisors, the ninth biggest Sprint shareholder with more than 2 percent of Sprint shares, has also said that Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen's offer was in the lead.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Richard Chang)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ontario-teachers-vote-softbank-sprint-deal-235720751.html

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