Day one of the Seven Network’s billion-dollar claim that its
rivals killed its pay TV ambitions zeroed in on just one suspect:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, reports The SMH. News Ltd threatened to use a Foxtel board
veto if its pay-TV partner Telstra pushed to give rival Kerry Stokes’s
sports channel C7 access to its network, the Federal Court was told
yesterday. In a highly charged opening to the most expensive trial staged in
Australia, Mr Stokes’s Seven Network accused the Foxtel partners of
conspiring to put the fledgling C7 out of business, reports The Australian.

The Age reports that Lion Nathan has counter-attacked in its $352 million hostile
takeover of Adelaide’s Coopers by seeking a declaration of
unacceptable circumstances from the Takeovers Panel. With both companies claiming foul play, the panel has said it
has not yet decided whether to conduct proceedings on the
applications. It’s one of the more curious takeover contests, says Stephen Bartholomeusz in The Smage, which
could result in acceptors receiving substantially less than the
$260-a-share bid price. The outcome appears to have bemused some observers, who see it
as a gross failure of corporate governance and view the behaviour
of the Coopers’ board, which is opposed to the takeover, as denying
shareholders the opportunity to receive a generous price for their
shares. Coopers is, however, no ordinary company and this is no
conventional bid.

The federal government is facing new pressure to delay the full
privatisation of Telstra because of concerns the proposed legislation
would strengthen the telco’s power and weaken the ACCC’s ability to
enforce its decisions, reports The Fin Review. Also in the AFR,
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s resounding election win is
good economic news for Australia, whose growth expectations had begun
to lean perilously heavily on China.

On Wall Street, US stocks ended mostly higher overnight after
crude-oil prices dropped to a five-week low, with a raft of deals led
by Oracle’s $US3.6 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems
lending support. The Dow Jones

was up 4.38 points at 10,682 – MarketWatch has a full report here.