Management said that the price they offered was not good enough, or more specifically the offers did not give shareholders a chance to continue to participate. That is a true statement in most cases....look at KSL. True, it jumped $12 in one day after the buyout offer, but most people that really understand the value of the GP, would have preferred being able to hold it rather than have it taken away (for cash) and not having any further participation. KSL was in an enviable position of being able to increase their own distribution by 1.30x of whatever KPP increased theirs by....it was a fabulous situation and Valero recognized it and bought them as well as KPP. Technically, Valero had to buy KSL in order to take out KPP because KSL was the GP but the story is still the same, even if they(or any entity for that matter) had just taken out KSL and not KPP...
Like Ben Graham used to say, in the short term, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, its a weighing machine.
We'll just have to sit back and see. I have read the article you mention, I see a company that has a commanding prescence in some areas as far as supplying fuel, and a company that now has a strong financial backer as well as one that will have an MLP with access to cheap capital. Again you don't mention anything about the ability to hedge away some of the exposure, nor do you mention the benefits of MS taking on alot of the risk....yes, the marketing biz presented a big(huge-if it makes you feel better vuss) problem for the MLP's because it is most likely that most of the MLP's offered cash for the assets, rather than offering to buy the whole company, which is the mo for almost all MLP's(always buy the assets if possible rather than the whole company as their is alot less baggage that comes with individual asset buys). So, the dilemma was, TMG would have received alot of cash, paid off their debt and been left with a good chunk of cash but would also be left with just the marketing/rack sales biz w/o hard asset access. Probably not the most efficient way of liquidating the company, and with the way the article states it, TMG apparantly has a strong brand name and is well received as a supplier....two sides to every coin. So why not get the best of both worlds, IPO the MLP, but retain a large holding, bring in a financial player that has more resources and talent to bear some of the risk as wel as the upside of profiting from locale differentials and by holding a large chunk of the MLP, TMG gets to let the market value the terminals at the very attractive multiples that are being placed on MLP's and consequently that value will show up in the holdings of the GP......