You gotta be kidding. First prove that you have the 290 MILLION asking price, and that you are interested, then you get finally get to see how much the diseased corpse is worth?!

Come on, what kind of moron is bidding for that?!

There is actually a very good reason for this requirement.

The idea is to keep non potential bidders from getting a look at how bad things really are inside the company. Imagine if you were an analyst/reporter who wanted to look at how bad things were mucked up and then write an article.

The whole idea is that you have to prove that you can really afford to buy the company before they'll let you see their financial statements which probably has a lot of confidential information.

Just think how bad it would be if someone started printing out which customers got bilked and by how much... Then no one would want to do business in India and you'll see a big hit on offshoring ...

Hmmm maybe that's not such a bad idea. Maybe the Reg could raise the capital and do a report? ;-)