The Japanese owner of 7-Eleven said Wednesday its founding family had offered a counter-bid to a takeover attempt by Canadian convenience store rival Alimentation Couche-Tard (ACT).With around 85,000 outlets, 7-Eleven is the world’s biggest convenience chain. If realised, Couche-Tard’s seven trillion yen ($45 billion) takeover would be the largest foreign buyout of a Japanese firm.Bloomberg News said up to nine trillion yen could be spent on taking the retail group private instead.Seven & i said on Wednesday it had received a non legally binding acquisition proposal from its vice president Junro Ito, the founder’s son, and his company Ito-Kogyo.A special committee “has been reviewing the proposal carefully and thoroughly with its financial and legal advisors”, its statement said.”No determination has been made at this time to pursue a transaction with either Mr Ito and Ito-Kogyo, ACT, or any other party, and there can be no assurance that any such transaction will be entered into or consummated,” it cautioned.Ito-Kogyo holds a stake of around eight percent in the Japanese retail giant. “Mr Ito has been excluded from all discussions within the Company… relating to any proposal,” the statement said.Seven & i stocks closed more than 11 percent higher, having soared as much as 17 percent following the news.The 7-Eleven franchise began in the United States, but it has been wholly owned by Seven & i since 2005.Around a quarter of 7-Eleven stores are in Japan, where the stores are a cherished one-stop shop for everything from rice balls to concert tickets.Couche-Tard, which began with one store in Canada’s city of Laval in 1980, now runs nearly 17,000 convenience outlets worldwide.The Nikkei, citing sources close to Seven & i, said the company had begun talks with financial institutions to procure the necessary resources to go private.But it said potential obstacles could include whether the banks would agree to the huge loans required.Seven & i is Japan’s biggest retailer, with a current market cap of 6.5 trillion yen.In September, it rejected an initial takeover offer from Couche-Tard, saying the proposal “grossly” undervalued its business and could face regulatory hurdles.Then the group said last month it had received a revised offer that reportedly totalled around seven trillion yen.To boost its share price and fend off Couche-Tard, Seven & i has also announced a major restructuring, including plans to spin off its non-core businesses.To allow it to focus on 7-Eleven, its new holding company will comprise its supermarket food business, speciality stores and other businesses.

Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore cancelled flights to and from the Indonesian resort island of Bali on Wednesday, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower miles into the sky.Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a nine-kilometre (5.6-mile) tower a day earlier.Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as cancelled on Wednesday, according to an AFP journalist at Bali’s international airport.”Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” said AirAsia as it announced several cancellations.Multiple eruptions from the 1,703-metre (5,587-foot) twin-peaked volcano in recent weeks have killed nine people, with 31 injured and more than 11,000 evacuated, Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency said Tuesday.Eruptions can pose serious risks to flights, disgorging fine ash that can damage jet engines and scour a plane’s windscreen to the point of invisibility.Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific also listed its flights as cancelled, rescheduling routes to and from Bali until Thursday.”Virgin Australia has made some changes to its current flight schedule, due to the impacts of the volcano in Indonesia,” the airline said, listing scrapped flights to Sydney and Melbourne.Jetstar said all flights to and from Bali would be halted until noon on Thursday.”Due to volcanic ash caused by the Mount Lewotobi eruption in Indonesia, it is currently not safe to operate flights to and from Bali,” the company said in an advisory.Qantas said “a number of flights to and from Denpasar Airport in Bali have been disrupted” due to volcanic ash from Lewotobi.Malaysia Airlines said it had cancelled six flights Wednesday in a statement on its website.The airlines said they would monitor the volcano’s status and provide updates.Singapore’s Scoot and Malaysia’s AirAsia did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment. Singapore Airlines was still listing its flights as running on Wednesday.- refunds, rescheduling, re-routing -Ahmad Syaugi Shahab, general manager of Bali’s international airport, said 12 domestic and 22 international flights had been affected on Tuesday, without identifying the routes.He did not provide details about affected flights on Wednesday’s schedule. “Due to this natural event impacting flight operations, airlines are offering affected passengers the options of refunds, rescheduling, or re-routing,” he added in a statement.Bali’s international airport operator PT Angkasa Pura Indonesia said Wednesday it had conducted tests in its airspace and no volcanic ash was detected, saying the airport was “operating as normal”.Lewotobi erupted again from midnight Wednesday until early morning, and a large ash column could be seen pouring from its crater, an AFP journalist nearby said.Laki-Laki, which means “man” in Indonesian, is twinned with a calmer volcano named after the Indonesian word for “woman”.The island’s economy is heavily reliant on tourism but Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone nations on Earth, straddling the Pacific Ring of Fire where tectonic plates collide.Lombok, an island neighbouring Bali, was rocked by earthquakes in 2018 that killed more than 500 and sparked a mass exodus of foreigners from the tropical paradise.