The company that holds Washington Mutual's legacy business can move ahead with its plan to buy a controlling interest in Nationstar Mortgage now that both companies' shareholders have approved the deal.
Holders of approximately 80% of the shares of WMIH that were entitled to vote approved the proposal and more than 90% of holders of outstanding shares of Nationstar entitled to vote were in favor of the transaction.
"We expect this merger to create value for Nationstar's stockholders in both the near and long-term as we continue to seek to accelerated growth by leveraging our best-in-class integrated servicing and originations platform and further enhancing the customer experience through innovation and service," said Jay Bray, chairman and CEO of Nationstar, in a press release.
The deal is structured so that WMIH's Wand Merger Corp. will merge with and into Nationstar and Nationstar will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of WMIH.
WMIH Corp. would pay for
The stock exchange has an anticipated value of $702 million, and WMIH has secured $2.75 billion in financing commitments for the transaction.
Nationstar's operations, employee base and name would remain unchanged as part of the new company. But the new company would trade, at least initially, under the ticker symbol WMIH. WMIH is owned by a group of institutional holders, the largest of which is investment firm KKR. KKR owns 24% of WMIH's voting shares.
