If at first you don’t succeed, flash a fat wallet and try again. Seven years after dropping its bid for Unocaldue to political opposition in the US, China’s Cnoochas tabled a $15bn offer for Nexen, an oil explorer in Canada – also hostile territory for foreign takeovers. Judging by the accompanying love-bombs – Cnooc will list its shares in Toronto and make Calgary its North America hub – Beijing, Cnooc’s main shareholder, does not intend to lose this one.

Only misguided politics could derail this deal. Canada has more oil and gas than it needs and China has the opposite problem. Nexen’s shareholders should hope for no less: their company has underperformed the Toronto energy index by about a third in the past five years. Cnooc’s $27.50-a-share cash offer represents a 66 per cent premium to Nexen’s 20-day weighted average share price. That may be too high to flush out a rival offer. Investors will recall that Totalcircled Nexen in 2008 without actually biting. However, the French group no longer needs the heft that such an acquisition would provide.

The acquisition is unlikely to add value for Cnooc, though – synergies will never make up the bid premium. Its shareholders would have been better off buying Nexen shares in the open market. Still, Cnooc bags assets not only in Canada but in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and offshore of Nigeria, and raises the amount of reserves the company will have in North America from 6 per cent to 20 per cent (Nexen has 2bn barrels of proven and probable reserves).