New York’s Ramius, which made last month’s unsolicited offer to acquire San Diego’s Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYPD]]) for $160 million, pushed again today to meet with the biotech, and even sweetened its offer slightly. A statement issued by Ramius Value & Opportunity Advisors includes a letter to Cypress saying, “We…are extremely disappointed that the company has not taken us up on our recent offer to engage in meaningful negotiations.” Cypress rejected the Ramius offer last week and announced that it is withdrawing from its commercial business, selling its rights to its fibromyalgia drug, and laying off 86 percent of its workforce. In its letter today, Ramius reiterated its $4 a share offer, adding another 39 cents per share to acquire a half stake in BL-1020, an anti-psychotic drug Cypress acquired earlier this year. That increased the overall offer by almost $15 million.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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