Anheuser-Busch had made the offer of a partial share, with the idea of winning the support of American tobacco company Altria and the Santo Domingo family of Colombia, which are SABMiller’s two largest shareholders.
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The brinkmanship puts pressure on SABMiller’s board, led by Jan du Plessis, who will have to smooth over bitter shareholder division and renegotiate with AB Inbev if it wants to clinch the deal.
SAB shares closed down 0.7pc at £43.80 amid concern the takeover is still poised on a knife edge.
A week ago, AB InBev and SABMiller received US regulatory approval for their $107 billion merger, which moved what would be the biggest-ever consumer products deal, creating a brewer with almost 30% of the global market, closer to concluding.
Advisers continue to work on the transaction, and SABMiller’s board hasn’t made a decision to walk away from the deal as it reviews an improved offer from AB InBev, people familiar with the matter said.
The beer behemoth based in Belgium raised its offer of cash to £45 or $59.10 per share from its previous offer of £44 to appease numerous shareholders of SABMiller based in London, who have been watching the value of the offer drop with sterling.
In November, AB InBev clinched the deal after it raised its share and cash buyout offer to £70 billion, or $106 billion based on exchange rates at the time.
AB InBev, a multinational Belgian-Brazilian company, was responding to complaints from activist shareholders.
The deal was clinched with an agreement for Denver-based Molson Coors to take over SABMiller’s 58 percent stake in their venture, MillerCoors, reported to Reuters. With the increased cash, it’s now worth about 51.14 pounds a share.
“The revised deal remains unacceptable”, the company said in a statement. The company said the new terms value SABMiller at about 79 billion pound. That offer, valued at about £39 a share when the acquisition was announced a year ago, had surged to more than £50 recently.
According to The Wall Street Journal, RBC analyst James Edwardes Jones said he had already felt that AB InBev was paying a full price, because it exchanged its dollars into pounds before the after Brexit fall in the value of pound.
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SAB officials declined to comment on the memo or the pause in integration, which was mentioned earlier on Wednesday by trade publication Beer Business Daily.
