Liberty Strategic Capital, a personal fairness fund led by former Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, has acquired a hefty 5.5% stake in Lionsgate at a strategically delicate second for the corporate because it prepares to shut a $500 million acquisition of eOne and plans to separate up its studio and streaming companies.
Lionsgate declined to touch upon the information, revealed in an SEC filling this afternoon, that Liberty 77 Fund (a buyout fund working by Liberty Strategic Capital) bought 4,594,863 shares of Lionsgate in a number of dozen transactions between Aug. 10 and Aug. 30 at a value starting from simply over $7 a share to $7.46.77
The filng hints that the long-gestating separation of Lionsgate and Starz, which the corporate mentioned final month it expects to finish within the first quarter of 2024, could have prompted the transfer. It famous that Lionsgate “has publicly proposed a spin-off of its studio enterprise as a separate public firm.”
Mnuchin served because the 77th Secretary of the Treasury underneath former president Donald Trump from February of 2017 by means of January of 2021. He launched Liberty Strategic Capital that yr. The agency’s web site says it centered on know-how, monetary providers/Fintech, and “new content material.”
The doc mentioned the brand new stakeholder could contact different shareholders, administration and board members of Lionsgate with “options or proposals” on a variety of points — “together with a possible funding by the Reporting Persons in a spin-off of the Issuer’s studio enterprise or different restructuring, belongings and liabilities, enterprise and financing options, the composition of the board of administrators and such different issues because the Reporting Persons could deem related to their funding within the Issuer.”
“The Issuer has publicly proposed a spin-off of its studio enterprise as a separate public firm, LG Orion Holdings Inc. (“SpinCo”). The Reporting Persons could have interaction in any of the actions described above with respect to SpinCo, previous to or following completion of the spin-off.”
The entrance of any sort of activist, or doable activist, investor is usually good new for a corporation’s inventory value. Lionsgate shares are up greater than 3% in after-hours buying and selling.
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