Montreal: TVA Group and Caisse de Depot subsidiary Capital Communications cdpq have announced a joint offer to acquire all the outstanding shares of Motion International, the country’s second largest integrated production and distribution company.

The new company, TVA International, which rolls over the existing TVA International with the merged Motion, will be 70% owned by tva and 30% owned by cdpq. Motion shareholders will receive an all-cash offer of $5.45 per share in a deal that costs tva close to $88 million, says TVA International president Andre Provencher.

The company expands tva’s asset base by an estimated $210 million, and will not trade as a separate publicly listed company.

In a separate deal, Motion’s domestic production division, which supplies first-window programming to Quebec’s French-language tv networks and specialty channels, will be sold off to four of the division’s current managers at a price of $10 million.

In the deal, announced March 30, TVA International incorporates Motion’s youth and animation division, its national (English) and international drama divisions, its large-format division and its distribution division, which includes the country’s leading joint-venture tv distributor, Fox/Motion.

Provencher says Motion ‘has a great management team’ and all the divisional presidents will remain in their posts.

‘It’s very exciting,’ he says. ‘For tva it is the signal to become an even more integrated content provider and distributor along with our assets in [Internet portal] Netgraphe, in Infiniti and in publishing [Trustar] and broadcasting.’

The deal is expected to close no later than May 5.