So Weir Group did end up offering some cash (sort of) to Metso shareholders

Sincere apologies - I forgot to highlight in my post earlier today that Weir Group offered some cash in its latest £8.5 billion merger proposal to Finnish engineer Metso.

Some readers might not remember that a few weeks ago when I suggested Weir Group might be willing to offer some cash to Metso as part of fresh takeover proposal for the business, the company went a tad ballistic, going on the record with a non-denial, denial to any news service that would listen.

Here is a link to that sorry episode: http://betaville123.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/metso-back-under-spotlight.html

Anyway, as you can see from this morning's statement from Weir Group, the FTSE 100 company said that as part of its revised all-share merger proposal to Metso, it also "proposed a special dividend payable to all shareholders in the combined group post-closing equivalent to Euro 2.13 per share in cash to a Metso shareholder, assuming full acceptance of the offer".

Many of my buy-side investor sources say Weir Group's Euro 2.13 special dividend offer is just another way of offering cash to Metso shareholders without doing it directly as part of the merger proposal. Fancy that! (Sorry, I am going to stop using that line but couldn't resist on this occasion).