Is Prem Watsa Insane to Purchase BlackBerry?

Canada, what is he thinking?

What is he thinking?

I think people are giving him a little bit more credit as of yesterday because we found out he may not actually -- cerberus capital management yesterday we learned is considering or planning to sign a confidentiality agreement with blackberry.

Well short of deciding to go ahead and did for the company, but certainly they want a proper take of the tires and look at the companies and get access to financials.

Given that, cerberus with a good track record, perhaps shows prem may not be going out on as much as a limb as people thought but there are still many questions to be answered about the bid, named -- namely the lack of other named bidders and financing.

What the date tell us about prem watsa?

If you go back 30 years to the very first deal, it was not far off from blackberry, but just by an order of magnitude of 1000. it was to buy a company which was an ailing trucking insurance company, believe it or not.

The stock had fallen 80% in the last five years.

Sound familiar?

And he put together a deal, $2 billion in equity and -- sorry, it was 2 million, now we are talking about 2 billion.

Recently he didn't ask -- interesting deal to rescue the bank of he teamed up with four other investors including wilbur ross and prem in particular draws an analogy between that and this deal.

He says we did not have all the investors on board ready to be named and it was only when they were ready to be named in which the head, after they had all done due diligence, that we named them and put together a 40% stake in the bank to save it.

And he says, look, the same thing here.

I have the investors.

They just need the reassurance and the due diligence before they are willing to go out and be named and be subject to the kind of media scrutiny.

Well, hugo, certainly some parallels.

Thank you for joining us.

Hugo miller.

To read more of his entire story on blackberry, pick up the latest edition of "bloomberg businessweek" on stands and your ipad tomorrow.

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