Chavez Redux #1

Reuters released a short piece today on the "canny tactics" of Chavez, appearing to put him somewhere between Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Brazil’s Lula. The story follows on the heels of Venezuela’s recent offer to purchase Verizon’s stake in CANTV at a price equal to $17.85 per ADR (symbol: VNT). That’s a better deal than markets first assumed when the ADR shares fell to the $12-14 range in mid-January:

VNT was trading between $19 and $20 going into 2007, so $17.85 implies a 6-10% haircut. It could have been worse–in fact, as haircuts go, it’s not much worse than a typical sales charge for "A shares" in a mutual fund! Canny indeed.