[WASHINGTON] President Donald Trump this week will declare that a deal to divest TikTok‘s US operations from its Chinese owner ByteDance will meet requirements set out in a 2024 law, a White House official said on Monday, adding that investors will include Oracle and private equity firm Silver Lake.
ByteDance will own less than 20 per cent while TikTok US will be controlled by a mix of its existing US and global firms as well as a significant number of new investors who have no affiliation with ByteDance, the official said. Reuters reported many of the details on Saturday.
The full slate of investors is not yet finalised. “It’s going to be real household names,” the official added, saying that Trump will sign an executive order certifying that the deal is legal under the law.
The agreement requires that all data on American users will be stored on US cloud computing infrastructure run by Oracle.
Trump said on Sunday that media mogul Lachlan Murdoch and business leaders Larry Ellison and Michael Dell would be involved as US investors in a proposed deal to keep TikTok operating in the United States.
The US is confident that China has approved the deal and does not plan further talks with Beijing about its details, the official told reporters on a conference call, but added that additional paperwork is required from both sides.
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The Chinese embassy in Washington said on Monday it “would be happy to see productive commercial negotiations in keeping with market rules lead to a solution that complies with China’s laws and regulations and takes into account the interests of both sides.”
The official added that the valuation of TikTok‘s US assets will be “many billions of dollars.”
The US government will not take a board seat or receive a golden share in the new entity that will own TikTok US. It is unclear if the US government will receive payments as a condition of approval.
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Trump is trying to keep the short video app with 170 million US users from being banned after Congress passed a law that ordered it shut down by January 2025 if its US assets were not sold by owner ByteDance.
Trump has delayed enforcement of the law through mid-December amid efforts to extract TikTok‘s US assets from the global platform, line up American investors and ensure that the new ownership qualifies as a full divestiture needed under the 2024 law.
Trump’s executive order will include a new 120-day enforcement pause to allow the investors and ByteDance to close the agreement, the official added.
Last week’s progress toward a deal on TikTok marked a rare breakthrough in months-long talks between the world’s two biggest economies, that have sought to defuse a wide-ranging trade war that has unnerved global markets. REUTERS
