(Bloomberg) -- Occidental Petroleum Corp. rose more than 8% after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. won approval to buy as much as 50% of the stock.
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Berkshire applied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for authorization on July 11, according to a filing published Friday.
“It is concluded that the Proposed Transaction is consistent with the public interest and is authorized” subject to conditions, Carlos D. Clay, acting director division of electric power regulation, said in the filing.
Berkshire has spent this year snapping up Occidental stock, digging even deeper into a bet on the oil company that first started to play out years ago. In 2019, Buffett aided CEO Vicki Hollub’s pursuit of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. by agreeing to invest $10 billion in Occidental at the time, a pact that included both preferred shares and warrants.
This year, Buffett praised Hollub’s leadership, a sign that the billionaire investor was all-in on Occidental. That stirred up speculation that Berkshire, with more than $105 billion in cash on hand at the end of June, could seek to buy more stock.
(Updates with context in fourth paragraph.)
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