NEW YORK(Reuters) -Billionaire investor William Ackman, who had raised the biggest-ever special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), said on Monday he would be returning roughly $4 billion to investors after failing to find a suitable target company to take public.
The news signals a setback for the prominent hedge fund manager who had initially planned for the SPAC to take a stake in Universal Music Group at a time these vehicles were all the rage on Wall Street.
At the start, Pershing Square Tontine raised $4 billion in its initial public offering and wooed prominent investors ranging from hedge fund Baupost Group, Canadian pension fund Ontario Teachers and mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price Group.
But trouble soon arrived when Ackman tried to take a 10% stake in Universal Music which was being spun off by French media conglomerate Vivendi. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission objected and Ackman put the investment into his hedge fund instead.
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
