Walgreens offers $2.8 bil to buy Longs Drug Stores

NEW YORK _ Walgreen made an offer late tonight to buy Longs Drug Stores Corporation for $2.8 billion, hoping to unseat a rival offer from CVS Caremark that Longs had already accepted.

Deerfield-based Walgreens said it would pay $75 a share in cash to buy the California-based Longs. That bests CVS's price of $71.50 per share, also in cash, which was equivalent to about $2.7 billion. Either deal would also include the assumption of about $200 million in debt.

Walgreens CEO Jeffrey Rein said in a letter to Longs' board of directors that the company would prefer to negotiate with Longs directly but was also prepared to take the offer directly to the company's shareholders.

Earlier today, the largest shareholder in Longs said it opposed the deal with CVS and had identified four other potential buyers.