Onexim says to buy control in RBC for $80 mln

Russian magnate Mikhail Prokhorov's Onexim Group said on Tuesday it had agreed to buy 51 percent of business news provider RBC , Russia's most public victim of the financial squeeze on media, for $80 million.

Onexim said in a statement it and RBC would propose to RBC's creditors to accept 20 percent of outstanding debt in cash, write down some debt and restructure the remaining debt in new instruments.

The takeover must be agreed with creditors.

'Of the options we had, this one is the best,' RBC chief executive and major shareholder German Kaplun told Reuters. 'The shareholders and creditors have the final word and we hope we can convince them.'

Onexim's statement did not specify the proportion between the writedown and the new issue. The shares of RBC jumped by more than 12 percent on the news.

Prokhorov's Onexim initially offered $35 million for 65 percent of a new share issue and a debt writedown of at least 45 percent.

Onexim executive Dmitry Razumov told Kommersant newspaper in an interview published on Monday he saw a window of about three months to close a deal.

'Any longer, and I am afraid there will be nothing to agree on,' Razumov was quoted as saying.

Russia has only a handful of successful restructuring cases to boast of and almost no distressed mergers and acquisitions among publicly listed companies. A deal for RBC would be one of the first.