AT&T extended the deadline to close its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner until next spring in the wake of an antitrust lawsuit challenging the merger.
The telecom giant wrote in an SEC filing Tuesday that the new termination date for the deal is April 22, 2018, and that it plans to “vigorously contest the DOJ’s allegations and is confident that the court will reject the DOJ’s challenge to the merger.”
The merger’s original termination date of Oct. 22 was initially pushed back for “a short period of time” in order to secure final regulatory approvals, but the companies still hoped to finalize the deal by the end of the year.
Earlier this month, however, reports surfaced that Justice Department regulators pushed AT&T to divest some assets in order to clear the merger. Last week, the department filed a lawsuit to block the deal and said it would “greatly harm American consumers.”
AT&T responded that the lawsuit represented “a radical and inexplicable departure from decades of antitrust precedent.”
