Spirit delays Frontier vote in bidding contest with JetBlue

• Spirit Airlines has postponed a shareholder vote on its merger with Frontier.
• The vote was originally supposed to take place on June 10th.
• JetBlue’s offer of $3.6 billion for Spirit was rejected by Spirit’s board.

Once again postponing a shareholder vote on its merger with Frontier Airlines, Spirit Airlines is giving rival bidder JetBlue Airways, which wants to buy Spirit outright, the upper hand.

Spirit has rescheduled the vote three times; it was originally supposed to take place on June 10th. Later, the date was moved to June 28, but Spirit had originally scheduled it for July 8—the day before the vote—last week.

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Spirit announced on Thursday that the vote would now take place on July 15 in order to forward its negotiations with both airlines.

The delays are good news for JetBlue Airways, which jumped in with an all-cash offer of $3.6 billion to acquire Spirit in April. Frontier and Spirit announced a $2.9 billion cash and equity merger to create a cheap giant two months prior.

After the most recent delay, JetBlue’s CEO Robin Hayes said in a statement, “We are encouraged by our negotiations with Spirit and are hoping they now appreciate that Spirit shareholders have signalled their clear, overwhelming preference for an agreement with JetBlue.

JetBlue’s offers, including those that had been sweetened, were repeatedly rejected by Spirit’s board on the grounds that it did not believe regulators would approve the transaction. JetBlue claimed that both transactions would be subject to regulatory review, and Hayes claimed that Spirit’s board had not given JetBlue’s proposals its complete attention.

According to a person familiar with the situation, it wasn’t obvious whether Spirit would get the shareholder backing it needed to pass the Frontier merger before the last planned meeting.

Frontier, which recently increased the value of its bid for Spirit by almost doubling the cash component to $4.13 a share, declined to comment on the most recent vote postponement right away.

In premarket trading on Friday, Spirit shares increased by more than 1% while Frontier shares decreased by 0.2 %. JetBlue saw a 0.3% increase.

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