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Alibaba Group held talks with Singapore’s Temasek Holdings about providing financing so that it can buy out Yahoo and Temasek might help finance an offer in return for a bigger share in privately owned Alibaba. Temasek is uninterested in owning Yahoo and Yahoo’s 40 per cent stake in Alibaba may be worth about US$13 billion (S$17 billion).The Alibaba-Temasek arrangement would likely be part of a possible takeover bid for Yahoo! with private-equity firm Silver Lake and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies………………..

Alibaba Group has talked with Singapore’s Temasek about providing financing to buy out Yahoo!‘s 40 percent stake and Temasek, the state-owned investment company, may help fund an offer in return for a bigger share of privately owned Alibaba Group, said the people who declined to be identified because the discussions are confidential. Temasek isn’t interested in owning Yahoo and Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba may be worth about $13 billion, using a valuation by the Singapore investor last month. Temasek’s backing would aid Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma’s bid to gain more control of the company he founded and increase Temasek’s investments in China and the S$193 billion ($147 billion) sovereign wealth investor said in July that it’s bullish on China and is seeking more deals there. Temasek valued Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company, at $32 billion in an investment last month and the Alibaba-Temasek arrangement would likely be part of a possible takeover bid for Yahoo with private-equity firm Silver Lake and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies. Silver Lake has let Yahoo know of its efforts and is trying to line up financing to pursue the deal and no clear deal structure or consortium has yet emerged. Yahoo’s advisers at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) are sending out select financial data to certain parties and the company is not yet requiring interested parties to sign confidentiality agreements and also hasn’t created a so-called data room where bidders could dig further into Yahoo’s business. Yahoo fired Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz last month and started a review of its strategy and last year, Bartz turned down efforts by Alibaba to buy shares held by Yahoo. Temasek, Silver Lake and DST offered to buy as much as $1.6 billion of Alibaba stock from the Chinese company’s employees last month, two people close to the situation said at the time. Temasek had 22 percent of its assets invested in telecommunications, media and technology, down from 24 percent the year before.

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