The US government has received a bid from Oracle for TikTok’s American operations after the video-sharing app’s parent ByteDance rejected a proposal from Microsoft, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday.
Mnuchin told CNBC his office received the proposal involving Oracle over the weekend and said the bid would be handled by a government panel that reviews foreign transactions for national security concerns.
Oracle confirmed the submission, saying the company “is part of the proposal by ByteDance to the Treasury Department over the weekend in which Oracle will serve as the trusted technology provider.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has sought the sale of TikTok from ByteDance, citing concerns about US data security.
The transaction is being structured as a partnership and probably won’t be an outright sale, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources.
“I will confirm that we did get a proposal over the weekend that includes Oracle as the trusted technology partner,” Mnuchin said. “We will be reviewing that at the committee this week and then we’ll be making a recommendation to the president and reviewing it with him.”
Mnuchin declined to go into detail on the bid.
“We need to make sure that the code is, one, secure, Americans’ data are secure, phones are secure, and we’ll be having discussions with Oracle over the next few days with our technical teams,” Mnuchin said.
In early August, Trump issued an executive order stating that if a purchase agreement was not reached by September 20, the platform would have to close in the United States.
Shares of Oracle were halted shortly after the open due to news pending on the company. Shares were up 4.3 percent at $59.44 at the time trading was frozen.
AFP
