Lachlan Murdoch and Bruce Gordon have launched a fresh bid for the embattled Ten Network, with an offer they claim will return more value to unsecured creditors than rival CBS can deliver, and will keep the broadcaster as an Australian listed company.
The new bid, delivered on Friday to Ten's administrators, offers Ten's unsecured creditors up to $55 million compared to the $32 million offered by US broadcaster CBS.
Mr Murdoch and Mr Gordon made the proposal through their respective investment vehicles Illyria and Birketu - revising and increasing a previous bid which was trumped by CBS when it launched its surprise takeover in August.
The CBS bid has been recommended by administrators KordaMentha but that recommendation remains subject to legal action by Mr Gordon.
A KordaMentha spokesman said the administrator will examine the legality of the 11th hour bid and will wait until Monday - when the NSW Supreme Court will hand down its ruling on Mr Gordon's challenge - before making a public response.
CBS and 21st Century Fox, where Mr Murdoch is executive co-chair, are Ten's largest creditors, owed $348 million and $195 million respectively, and their pricey historical content deals with Ten have been a significant factor in the network's financial problems, alongside licence fees and a persistently weak local ad market.
The new offer will seek to renegotiate those programming contracts and win support from Ten's unsecured creditors at a creditors' meeting scheduled for Tuesday.
If the contracts cannot be renegotiated, the Murdoch-Gordon bid offers CBS a return of $20 million and Fox $11.2 million.
The Murdoch-Gordon bid claims to offer a total return for creditors of 13.4 cents in the dollar, compared with 12.43 cents under the CBS offer.
On Thursday, new media ownership laws passed the Senate and are now certain to proceed through the lower house when federal parliament resumes - removing conditions that applied to the first Murdoch-Gordon bid.
Lawyers for Mr Gordon's Birketu this week argued in the Supreme Court that the CBS offer treated different creditors unfairly and was therefore a "transaction risk" and a magnet for litigation.
"The revised (Birketu and Illyria) proposal provides greater execution certainty, through eliminating the very real prospect of one or more challenges to the CBS (deed of company arrangement)," the new offer sates.
Birketu and Illyria said it was "incumbent" on the administrators to put the new offer to creditors with enough time and information ahead of the vote at the second creditors' meeting on September 19.
