Going public with its bid alongside Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs & Co. for Motion Picture Distribution, EdgeStone Capital Partners on Tuesday dismissed foreign ownership concerns over the acquisition of Canada’s largest independent movie distributor.

Samuel Duboc, president and managing partner at Toronto-based EdgeStone, a private equity investor, scoffed at recent media coverage suggesting Goldman Sachs is intent on wresting control of MPD from Canadian hands.

‘It’s not right, all of the information in the press. It [MPD] will be controlled by a Canadian company,’ Duboc tells Playback Daily.

Ending a nasty fight for control of the distributor that hopped in and out of the courts, Goldman Sachs and Edgestone say they will offer $10.00 per-unit to unitholders of Movie Distribution Income Fund to acquire MDIF’s 49% stake in MPD.

The buyout offer comes days ahead of a June 28 court date at which trustees of MDIF sought to block the pending $2.3 billion takeover of Alliance Atlantis by Goldman Sachs and CanWest Global Communications Corp. to force a higher takeout price for their minority stake in MPD.

Alliance Atlantis CFO David Lazzarato says he is ‘pleased’ with the $193.3 million offer to take MDIF private, and that his company will transfer its 51% controlling stake in MPD to the joint Goldman Sachs/EdgeStone bid.

The takeover of MPD will now be reviewed by Canadian Heritage’s Cultural Sector Investment Review board. That body will pore over the MPD bid, assessing how the newly constituted MPD’s ownership and unitholder agreement is structured, and how its directors and management are appointed.

David Zitzerman, a Toronto-based entertainment lawyer with Goodmans, says EdgeStone will structure the deal to ensure Heritage Canada is confident Goldman Sachs will have no undue influence over MPD, and that legal and de facto control of the movie distributor will lie with EdgeStone, its Canadian partner.

Duboc would not reveal the U.S. investment bank’s equity stake, nor other details of EdgeStone’s bid for MPD and its pending application for review to Heritage Canada.