A controversial international financial deal is off, with Thursday’s announcement that Rabobank’s offer to buy the Omaha-based Farm Credit Services of America will be spurned. Rabobank’s Lynn Burns says the original offer put on the table totaled 600-Million dollars. Burns says they’d increased the purchase-price offer to FCS by 150-Million earlier this month but she says it apparently wasn’t enough to “propel the board” to take the next step, filing required papers with federal regulators. She says Rabobank’s disappointed. Burns says Rabobank is committed to expanding its investment in U.S. agriculture. She says they’re looking to increase Rabobank’s presence in the US, hoping to put more competition into the market which she says will benefit farmers and ranchers. A news release from the company called the FCSA decision “a shortsighted response and not in the best interests of American agricultural producers or rural customers.”Paul Folkerts, chairman of the FCSA board and a farmer in Davenport, Nebraska, says the Farm Credit Service board took the deal as far as they could. Folkerts says he’s disappointed, and hoped they could move the issue at least to a vote. Folkerts says with the farm credit service unchanged, business should continue as usual. Professor Roger Ginder at Iowa State University has been tracking the deal since it was proposed, and with two other Iowa State economists he’d created a website just to archive and explain information about the proposed sale. Ginder points out the buyout of a cooperative is different since its organizational structure differs from that of a corporation. The professors’ aim was to put out neutral information that would help the FCS members who’d be asked to vote as well as be useful to the public and the press. There would have been a vote of the farm credit services membership later this year, but he says it looks like the board members decided to stop the process before it went any further along. The Rabobank offer had been under consideration for some time when Mankato, Minnesota, based AgStar made a counter-offer to buy the Farm Credit System, saying it would keep ownership of the Farm Credit System in the US and in the Midwest. Ginder says he doesn’t really know if FCS will pursue other offers like the AgStar one. The information site set up for data on the sale proposal is on the web at http://www.econ.iastate.edu/rabobankbuyout/
