Goldman and other banks, gain from Mittal deal

Five investment banks advising Mittal Steel on its 25.6 billion euro acquisition of rival Arcelor are set to reap fees and league table credit from the biggest deal in the steel sector.
Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, HSBC and Societe Generale will all gain if the agreement, announced last week, goes ahead. Goldman Sachs was the lead Mittal adviser, sources familiar with the matter said.
Their involvement in such a large deal would also help them spring up the M&A league tables, the fiercely competitive quarterly rankings of investment banks by the value of deals they have advised on.
Mittal's advisers were instrumental in helping to swing the board of Arcelor, which had initially been hostile to the idea of a deal with Mittal, to reaching Sunday's agreement.
They helped co-ordinate a rebellion among the Luxembourg steelmaker's shareholders against terms of an alternative deal with Russia's Severstal, helping to force talks between Mittal and Arcelor which led to the agreed offer, the sources said.
A successful deal would be the biggest on record in the steel sector, according to statistics from data consultancy firm Dealogic.
But the job for Mittal's advisers is not yet over as Severstal, which is being advised by ABN AMRO and Lehman Brothers, continues to mull its options after indicating on Sunday it has not yet given up on a tie-up with Arcelor
Arcelor has said it would cancel its deal with Severstal if shareholders representing 50 percent of its capital vote against it at a meeting on Friday.
Severstal revised the terms of its merger proposal last week, saying CEO Alexei Mordashov would settle for 25 percent of a new combined Arcelor-Severstal group rather than 32.3 percent and that the revised deal represented a 2 billion euro improvement for Arcelor.
Mittal's advisers are now vying to rally enough opposition to a deal with Severstal to get shareholders to vote down the proposal at a meeting on Friday, where at least 50 percent are rerquired to oppose it, the sources said.
Arcelor is being advised by BNP Paribas, Calyon, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Banco Santander and UBS.