Cisco almost closes Tandberg deal. DoJ investigating.

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As part of it original offer to acquire video conferencing vendor Tandberg, Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO) has a condition that 90 percent of shares needed to vote in favor of the deal.

That hasn’t happened.

After two deal deadline extensions ,with the last one ending on Thursday Dec 3rd, Cisco still does not control 90 percent of Tandberg shares. But they are close, very close, but as they say,’close only counts in horseshoes‘ right?.

According to Cisco, they now control approximately 89 percent of Tandberg shares.

“The received acceptances represent a lower acceptance ratio than the
90 percent condition to the offer set out in Section 1.7 in the offer
document dated October 7, 2009,” Cisco said in a statement. “However, Cisco has decided to waive
this 90 percent condition.”

Wait a second here, they can just ‘waive’ the 90 percent condition? Really?? Then why on Earth didn’t they just waive that condition before upping the deal by an additional $400 million and extending the deadline for acceptance twice?

**UPDATED 1:15 pm ET** Cisco has now issued another statement, and now they say they’ve got 91.1 percent of the voting shares of Tandberg.