OM'S Offer Remains Unattractive To Both Shareholders And Customers

In response to the publication of another circular from OM Gruppen on Friday and the announcement of its level of acceptances this morning, Don Cruickshank, Chairman of the London Stock Exchange, said: "OM's negligible level of acceptances demonstrates that OM's inadequate offer is of little or no interest to London Stock Exchange shareholders. It is time that OM acknowledged this and withdrew its offer. The Board of the London Stock Exchange is now determined to focus on the task of building the business.

"For our customers, despite only serving two small-scale equity exchanges, OM's equity trading system, SAXESS, has experienced serious reliability problems with 18 full or partial systems outages and delays since going live in April 1999. In addition, OM's exchanges have had numerous problems over the last two weeks."

London Stock Exchange's trading system - already efficient, reliable and scaleable

In its third circular, OM demonstrates a lack of understanding of the London Stock Exchange's trading system. The facts are:

Its capacity is already over 8x the level of average total trades per day and, following a planned upgrade, will be over 16x the level of average total trades per day, providing headroom to accommodate expected continuing growth in market volumes
In addition to this headroom, it has demonstrated its ability to cope with extreme peaks in customer demand and trading volumes, such as on index expiry dates
It will be further developed to support initiatives for the retail community, a pan-European trading market and trading in products other than cash equities. This includes the provision of planned and future upgrades as business needs require

Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, which is regulated in the United Kingdom by The Securities and Futures Authority Limited, is acting for London Stock Exchange plc and no one else in connection with the offer by OM and will not be responsible to anyone other than London Stock Exchange plc for providing the protections afforded to its customers or for providing advice in relation to the offer by OM. Schroder Salomon Smith Barney has approved this press release for the purposes of Section 57 of the Financial Services Act 1986.