The enlarged Group provides enhanced opportunities for portfolio rationalisation through sales and asset swaps.

They will have to provide technology and access to foreign markets through "their existing marketing and logistics infrastructure" and asset swaps.

In other words in aggregate it is just an asset swap.

Last July, Shell disclosed the $10 billion cost overrun only one week after Shell and Gazprom, Russia's state oil monopoly, announced an asset swap.

In financial accounting, an asset swap is an exchange of tangible assets for intangible assets or vice versa.

The total value of the asset swap is € 4.4 billion.

Whether an asset swap would benefit Cablevision as much as Fox remains to be seen.

This asset swap could have made Transmark's books look better than they should have looked.

The budget also attacks several maneuvers intended to delay or avoid taxes on the sales of securities like "short sales against the box" and various asset swaps.

Under tax laws, asset swaps are different from outright sales.