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Abstract
We think that outside investor will be [Warren Buffett]. Because we think Enron did indeed get a good bid from somebody for the Northern Border GP, but got lousy offers for the "aggregate"; the other pipelines, so decided, logically enough, to put the dogs with the premium asset and sell it all as a package. There are several possible scenarios. We think one likely one would be for Buffett to buy all of PipeCo and then sell off Transwestern and FGT to concentrate his ownership in what he would want: the Northern Border MLP general partner. Here Buffett would have what the Williams MLP private investors lacked: a clean general partner interest. Also, that would be in an asset--Northern Border taking 2.4 Bcf/d from Canada to Chicago--which has huge synergies with what he already owns: the Northern Natural pipeline which takes gas off Northern Border and distributes it all over the Midwest. Indeed, both assets were originally together in the old InterNorth Corp., a predecessor of Enron.