How Many More Tombstones in The Graveyard of Cancelled Deals?

The stock market, not content to just kill itself, clutched at two deals as it tumbled past. On Tuesday, BHP Billiton announced that it was abandoning its many-billions-of-dollars offer for Rio Tinto plc because the deal was no longer in the best interest of BHP's shareholders.

The cancellation has had ominous repercussions for Rio Tinto. Its stock is down a third and it is facing a ratings downgrade. It is planning to sell assets to pay down the debt it incurred when it bought Alcan.

Today, the private equity consortium which has, since July of 2007, been trying to buy BCE Inc. announced that their auditors were not able to certify that the post-acquisition BCE would be solvent. The $50 billion BCE transaction is a leveraged buyout. BCE would take on $33 billion in debt to fund the transaction. BCE has also gotten clobbered in trading today making it less likely that they'll be solvent by the drop-dead date of December 11th. More from Reuters here.

The BCE acquisition agreement is attached to a 13D/A filed July 5, 2007. The "Final Amending Agreement" was filed as a 6-K on July 10, 2008.

I wasn't able to find a proposed agreement in the BHP / Rio Tino deal, just lots of PowerPoints. Has anyone seen it?