By Gail Weinstein, Scott Luftglass, Robert Schwenkel and Warren de Wied ( August 7, 2017, 11:58 AM EDT) -- In DFC Global v. Muirfield (Aug. 1, 2017), the Delaware Supreme Court, en banc, reversed the Court of Chancery's appraisal decision involving the acquisition of DFC Global Corp., a publicly traded payday lending firm, by a private equity firm, and remanded the case for further consideration by the Court of Chancery. In its opinion below, the Court of Chancery had found, following full trial on the merits, that the underlying sales process was robust and competitive. However, the Court of Chancery also found that the extreme regulatory uncertainty facing the target company (specifically, a complete overhaul of the regulatory framework applicable to the company) undermined the reliability, for appraisal purposes, of the market's assessment of DFC Global's value. The Court of Chancery also viewed the regulatory uncertainty as undermining the reliability of the company's projections for a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis. The Court of Chancery therefore relied on a combination of the merger price, a DCF valuation, and a comparable companies valuation, weighted one-third each, to determine "fair value" — and the result was approximately 8.4 percent above the merger price....