Actelion restarts takeover talks with original suitor

In what could almost be called a Machiavellian twist, Swiss company Actelion (SIX: ATLN) seems to have spurned a second takeover suitor and gone back to the US the healthcare giant that started a spurned acquisition approach which was confirmed just a week ago.

Shares of Actelion were up nearly 7% at 230.00 Swiss francs ($224.27) in early trading this morning.

While speculation was rife that France’s Sanofi (Euronext: SAN) had stepped into the breach to buy the company, in a terse statement released late Wednesday, Actelion, Europe’s biggest biotech with a market value of around $22.5 billion, announced that it has entered into “exclusive negotiations” with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) regarding a possible strategic transaction. At the time J&J ended talks, Actelion said that it was “engaged in discussions with another party,” without saying who, leading to the Sanofi speculation, with any such specific discussion neither confirmed nor denied by the concerned parties.