LON­DON-The board of An­glo-Swiss min­ing com­pa­ny Xs­tra­ta PLC said yes­ter­day it is rec­om­mend­ing share­hold­ers ac­cept merg­er terms with Swiss com­modi­ties trad­er Glen­core PLC-a deal that would cre­ate an in­dus­try be­he­moth with rev­enues of around US$175 bil­lion. Xs­tra­ta said in a state­ment it was sup­port­ing the of­fer of 3.05 Glen­core shares for each Xs­tra­ta share. The deal val­ues Xs­tra­ta at £#31.9 bil­lion (US$51.5 bil­lion) on the shares' clos­ing price Fri­day. Glen­core has a mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion of ##£23.5 bil­lion, ac­cord­ing to da­ta provider Fact­Set. Xs­tra­ta is the world's biggest ex­porter of ther­mal coal and al­so pro­duces cop­per, nick­el and zinc. If the deal is ap­proved by 75 per cent of Xs­tra­ta share­hold­ers, the merged com­pa­ny would be one of the world's largest nat­ur­al re­sources firms.

Glen­core, one of the world's biggest traders in raw ma­te­ri­als such as coal, cot­ton and corn, went pub­lic with a US$10 bil­lion IPO last year. Its at­tempt to get hold of Xs­tra­ta has de­vel­oped in­to a long-run­ning saga. Pre­vi­ous of­fers were re­sist­ed by Xs­tra­ta share­hold­ers, in­clud­ing Qatari sov­er­eign wealth fund Qatar Hold­ing, which holds 12 per cent of Xs­tra­ta. Glen­core im­proved its orig­i­nal of­fer of 2.8 shares last month, leav­ing is­sues of man­age­ment struc­ture and ex­ec­u­tive re­mu­ner­a­tion the main stum­bling blocks to a merg­er. The deal an­nounced Mon­day would see Xs­tra­ta chief ex­ec­u­tive Mick Davis be­come CEO of the new com­pa­ny for six months, then leave the com­pa­ny to be suc­ceed­ed by Glen­core CEO Ivan Glasen­berg. (AP)