Filed under: Deals

Some of the fat cats in the Senate think that the Sirius Satellite (NYSE:SIRI) merger with XM Satellite (NYSE:XMSR) might be OK if the combined company would give up a large portion of its spectrum. According to The Wall Street Journal, these legislators would propose that the firms “divest as much as half of their combined radio spectrum as a condition of their proposed merger.”

Even though it isn’t clearly articulated, the reason for the proposal is so that the US government could, if it wanted to, sell that spectrum to another celebration to start a new satellite radio company. Even that option would grant the government to view XM plus Sirius as something short of a monopoly.

The Senate and the FCC actually know superior than to push their deal. Over the year-and-a-half that the merger has been pending, the two companies have gone from being in bad financial share to being in a dire set of circumstance. Each company has well in excess of $1 billion in debt. Neither has ever made a dime and their losses last quarter weren’t encouraging.

Continued at 24/7 Wall St.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 am and is filed under Engagements and Deals News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.