Tencent is not an unknown in the UK. It has won influence through education donations and the funding of chairs at Britain s top universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh.
This may be among the reasons the buyer is confident that its purchase will not need to be scrutinised under the terms of the recently passed UK Investment & Securities Act.
It also has powerful support in the investment community. Tencent became the biggest holding of Baillie Gifford s Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust when it sold out of Tesla earlier this year.
All of this makes the Tencent offer too cosy. It might have been hoped that the board would have put up resistance, given it is graced by Ian Livingstone as chairman and Michael Sherwin as senior non-executive, two heavy hitters from Games Workshop. Instead it embraced the predator without a smidgen of dissent.
173 job vacancies at booming Sheffield software company worth £900m
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Tencent snaps up British video game developer Sumo in $1 3 bln deal
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