According to an online betting exchange, the odds against the London Stock Exchange (lse) remaining independent have widened to eight to one. Deutsche Borse, a German exchange group, made a takeover proposal in December; Euronext, the product of mergers among the Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Paris exchanges, was quick to follow. Neither suitor has yet made a formal bid, but the lse is in talks with both. The online bookies make Euronext the slight favourite. Not all the would-be buyers' shareholders are happy, tci, a hedge fund which says it has bought more than 5% of Deutsche Borse's stock, has called for the German exchange to buy back shares rather than overpay for the ise. This is unlikely to worry Werner Seifert, Deutsche Borse's pipe-smoking, organ-playing chief executive: tci would need to have owned its stake for three months to call a shareholders' vote. However, tci's needling has exposed a weakness in Deutsche Borse's corporate governance. Its supervisory board, drawn mainly from the big banks that controlled it before its flotation in 2001, can hardly be said to represent the current, wider ownership. A small minority of Euronext shareholders also fears that their company's management might pay too much.
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