FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Takeover fantasy escaped from German wind farm developer PNE on Monday. Investors reacted with disappointment to the halt in sales talks by major shareholder Morgan Stanley for its block of shares. This caused massive price losses in the morning. The shares fell back to a low since September with a discount of up to 18 percent, most recently the minus was still more than 16 percent to 17.14 euros.

PNE had made the talks official in October; before the weekend, the company now said that Morgan Stanley was currently not continuing negotiations with potential interested parties on a complete acquisition of the share held by the US investment bank.

Shortly before, the German business weekly "Wirtschaftswoche" had reported on a bidding race in which, in the last round, only the infrastructure fund of Macquarie and a vehicle of the world's largest US fund manager Blackrock were said to be negotiating. According to the report, both offers were higher than the current market value, which was recently around one and a half billion euros.

The PNE share price had risen more than two and a half times in the past year - a large part of this rally was due to the takeover fantasy, said a trader in the morning. The share sale, which has been put on hold, is therefore "really bad news." Morgan Stanley currently holds more than 44 percent of PNE - in the event of a deal, the buyer would have had to submit a takeover offer to the remaining shareholders. Investors had probably speculated last year that this could turn out to be lavish.

Morgan Stanley had bought the stake in 2019 at just 4 euros per share. From the interested parties, the U.S. bank is said to have demanded bids of more than 25 euros, as the news agency Bloomberg had already reported in December with reference to insider circles. Several interested parties had then also decided against an offer.

With the entrance of the Americans the PNE course was again waked from its Sleeping Beauty sleep. In the previous ten years, the share price had mostly hovered around two to three euros. In the past year, apart from the takeover fantasy, the share price also soared in view of the energy price wars and the increasing focus on renewable energies. In December, the PNE share had climbed to an interim high of 24.10 euros - the highest level in more than 20 years. Since then, however, the share price had been falling steadily.

By the end of last week alone, the share had lost more than 15 percent of its value from the interim high. Currently, this loss adds up to almost 29 percent./tav/ag/mis