"Negotiations on our deal had started long before 9/11," he said.
In recent days the deal had started to look wobbly; the Federal Communications Commission was reportedly pushing for the deal to be put before an administrative judge, which would have delayed and probably killed the merger.
But in a telephone interview on Monday, he played down that valuation, citing concern that the onetime froth around patent deals has started to subside.
Since 2010, about eight sites, including Groupon, the global giant in the field of online deals, have started up in the region.
In the first three years of his four-year, $52.4 million deal, he has started only 194 of 486 games at catcher — or 39.9 percent.
This goes a long way towards explaining why the start-up was able to raise a whopping $1.1 billion in financing and why, in December, Google was willing to pay an even more astounding $6 billion for it.Mr Mason walked away from the deal and has started the process of getting a public listing.
But, having roundly trashed the deal, the City has started to come around.
For one, the pace of government-assisted deals for failed banks has started to slow, and many of the troubled lenders that remain do not have a big enough branch network or loan book to make a deal attractive.
Lowell Libson, who runs Spink-Leger, a New Bond Street gallery, has started dealing in old master drawings even though he built his reputation selling mainly 18th- and 19th-century British works on paper.
Although he has started dealing with rampant corruption in the public sector and has passed several pro-poor measures, including cutting taxes for low earners, he has unsettled investors by doubling mineral royalties, sacking the governor of the central bank, and blocking a previously agreed sale of a state-owned bank.
