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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The bid by Japan's Nippon Steel to buy U.S. Steel may have a new lease on life, even as the potential for a new bid for the storied Pittsburgh steelmaker began to emerge Monday.
Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Ohio-based steelmaker Cleveland Cliffs, said in a news conference Monday that he wanted to make a new bid for U.S. Steel, which accepted the buyout offer from Nippon in 2023 after it rejected an offer by Cleveland-Cliffs.
Goncalves declined to give financial details about the bid, but said in a news conference at a Cleveland-Cliffs plant in western Pennsylvania that it is an “all-American solution" to save U.S. Steel. He said he would relocate Cleveland-Cliffs' headquarters to Pittsburgh, keep the U.S. Steel name and make Cleveland-Cliffs part of U.S. Steel.
Over the weekend, the Biden administration extended a deadline for the Japanese steelmaker to abandon plans to acquire U.S. Steel after President Joe Biden blocked the deal.
The new deadline, now in mid-June, was viewed by U.S. Steel — and investors, apparently — as an opportunity for the companies to complete the acquisition, even though President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office in a week, also opposes the deal.
Biden nixed the acquisition this month citing a potential threat to national security, though the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, failed to reach a consensus on the security issue.
“We are pleased that CFIUS has granted an extension to June 18, 2025 of the requirement in President Biden’s Executive Order that the parties permanently abandon the transaction," U.S. Steel said in a statement Sunday. "We look forward to completing the transaction, which secures the best future for the American steel industry and all our stakeholders.”
Shares of U.S. Steel rose 6% in trading Monday.
The proposed deal kicked up an election year political maelstrom across America’s industrial heartland and quickly drew vows by Biden and Trump from the campaign trail in a critical battleground state to block the deal.
Even after the election, Trump wrote on social media in December that he is “totally against” U.S. Steel being bought by a foreign company and said he would block the deal as president. He reiterated that stance this month after it was blocked by Biden.
However, a CFIUS composed of Trump appointees and Trump himself may be free to allow the deal to go through, or negotiate new terms.
Dennis Unkovic, a Pittsburgh lawyer who works on international business transactions, including deals in which CFIUS approval was required, said a new CFIUS and a new president are not legally bound by Biden’s decision.