Source: MICHAEL TRAN / Getty
Byron Allen is expressing his interest in buying BET again to Paramount, this time raising his bid to $3.5 billion.
According to Variety, on Wednesday (Dec. 20), the media mogul Byron Allen emailed the senior executives of Paramount Global to voice his interest in acquiring the BET Media Group. The media group comprises the BET cable network, VH1, streaming service BET+, and BET Media Studios. The bid submitted on behalf of the Allen Media Group is $3.5 billion, a substantial increase from Allen’s previous bid of $2.7 billion in March.
“You are pursuing an inside sale at a below-market price with management that will not yield the highest price for the stockholders,” the email reportedly read. “We believe it would be an egregious breach of fiduciary duty by the Paramount Global management team and board of directors if BET is sold for anything less than the highest price, particularly, in order to provide a sweetheart deal to an insider at the expense of public shareholders.” Representatives at both Paramount Global and the Allen Media Group declined to comment when contacted by the press.
Allen already has competition in this latest bid, as word has it that Chinh Chu, a former Blackstone executive and head of CC Partners along with BET CEO Scott Mills have submitted their own reported bids of $2 billion. When Paramount Global first floated the prospect of BET being for sale in March, other interested parties included Sean “Diddy” Combs, Shaquille O’Neal, 50 Cent, and Tyler Perry. Paramount halted that process in August, stating that “a sale wouldn’t result in any meaningful deleveraging of its balance sheet.”
Byron Allen has made his media group a formidable independent player in the media industry, with 28 broadcast stations affiliated with the Big Four networks of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox as well as ownership of The Weather Channel in addition to 11 other cable networks. News of the offer surfaced as word broke out that the CEO of Paramount Global met with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav to begin talks about the two media giants merging. The news sent shockwaves throughout the public, as it would mark another major consolidation in the last three years.
