Kinder Morgan announced it would buy out all its subsidiaries, making it the largest energy infrastructure firm in North America, according to Bloomberg's Susan Warren.
At an all-in valuation of $71 billion, its the second-largest energy transaction ever, according to the FT's Stephen Foley.
The Houston-based firm currently has three additional sub-units independently trading on the New York Stock Exchange. These firms will now all be consolidated under the KMI ticker.
The move comes nearly a year after a trader named Kevin Kaiser of Hedgeye Risk Management called into question how Kinder Morgan was booking expenditures and criticized the wave of so-called Master Limited Partnerships, which Kinder Morgan had taken part in. MLPs are designed to allow energy companies to get around some corporate taxes. But Kaiser said MLPs constituted a "regulatory nightmare." In a statement on its site Sunday, Kinder Morgan CEO Richard Kinder said the transaction " dramatically simplifies the Kinder Morgan story."
Since Kaiser' Sept. 2013 analysis, all of Kinder Morgan's entities have underperformed the S&P500 (in gold):
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