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S&P Global, IHS Markit Spin Off Businesses, Prepare Merger

The firms provide much of the data, analytics and research that is used by the wealth management and wider financial services sector.
Business information, research and analytics group S&P Global and
IHS Markit, the
information service, have said they are selling businesses to
avoid falling foul of anti-trust regulations as they plan their
$44 billion merger.
S&P Global will sell securities data solutions provider CUSIP
Global Services (CGS) to financial data services firm FactSet for
$1.93 billion in cash, while IHS will sell its Base Chemicals
business to News Corp, for $295 million, they said in a statement
late in December.
The businesses have won US anti-trust clearance for the merger.
As part of the process, they must sell particular firms.
The firms said they expected that the combined group would
receive net sale proceeds of about $1.3 billion from the
transactions.
S&P Global has also pledged to divest its Leveraged
Commentary and Data (LCD) business, along with a related family
of leveraged loan indices as a condition for regulatory approval.
Under the European Commission's conditional approval of the
merger of S&P Global and IHS Markit, execution of an
agreement to sell the LCD business can occur after the closing of
the merger, the firms said in a statement on 27 December
2021.
The companies previously said they were divesting IHS Markit's
Oil Price Information Services (OPIS), Coal, Metals and Mining
(CMM), and PetroChem Wire (PCW) businesses to NewsCorp in August
2021 as part of the ongoing merger review process.
The divestitures remain subject to further review and approval by
antitrust regulators. S&P Global and IHS Markit still expect
to close their merger in the first quarter of 2022, subject to
closing conditions being satisfied.
Goldman Sachs is financial advisor to S&P Global, and
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz serves as legal counsel. Davis
Polk & Wardwell LLP is serving as legal counsel for IHS Markit.