Verizon reportedly tried to buy #2 cable company Charter, was rejected

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Verizon recently tried to buy Charter Communications for "well over $100 billion," but the US' second biggest cable company rejected the offer, according to a New York Post article yesterday. Charter rejected the offer "because it was too low-and because Charter was not ready to sell," the Post wrote, quoting anonymous sources.

Rumors about Verizon trying to buy Charter surfaced in January, a month after Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that a Verizon/Charter merger would make "industrial sense." In mid-April, McAdam said that he'd be willing to have merger talks with just about any company, including Comcast, the country's biggest cable operator. But he said that no deals were imminent and argued that no cable company could match Verizon's fiber network.

Those comments may have come after Charter rejected Verizon's offer. The Verizon offer to Charter was made "in recent months," the Post wrote. Chairman John Malone of Liberty Media, Charter's largest shareholder with a 19 percent ownership stake, is wary of the tax implications of a deal with Verizon and wants to give Charter more time to finish integrating its new Time Warner Cable subsidiary, the report said.

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