Offer Update

London Stock Exchange
30 October 2000



                                                               30 October 2000



        OM'S OFFER REMAINS UNATTRACTIVE TO BOTH SHAREHOLDERS AND CUSTOMERS



In response to the publication of another circular from OM Gruppen on Friday
and the announcement of its level of acceptances this morning, Don
Cruickshank, Chairman of the London Stock Exchange, said:

'OM's negligible level of acceptances demonstrates that OM's inadequate offer
is of little or no interest to London Stock Exchange shareholders. It is time
that OM acknowledged this and withdrew its offer. The Board of the London
Stock Exchange is now determined to focus on the task of building the
business.

'For our customers, despite only serving two small-scale equity exchanges,
OM's equity trading system, SAXESS, has experienced serious reliability
problems with 18 full or partial systems outages and delays since going live
in April 1999. In addition, OM's exchanges have had numerous problems over the
last two weeks.'


London Stock Exchange's trading system - already efficient, reliable and
scaleable

In its third circular, OM demonstrates a lack of understanding of the London
Stock Exchange's trading system. The facts are:

  * Its capacity is already over 8x the level of average total trades per
    day and, following a planned upgrade, will be over 16x the level of
    average total trades per day, providing headroom to accommodate expected
    continuing growth in market volumes
  * In addition to this headroom, it has demonstrated its ability to cope
    with extreme peaks in customer demand and trading volumes, such as on
    index expiry dates
  * It will be further developed to support initiatives for the retail
    community, a pan-European trading market and trading in products other
    than cash equities. This includes the provision of planned and future
    upgrades as business needs require

The Board of London Stock Exchange believes that one of the fundamental
objectives of the management of an equity exchange is to maintain an efficient
and reliable trading system and to manage capacity demands. This is what the
London Stock Exchange has done in practice and will continue to do in the
future.



London Stock Exchange

Jeremy Hughes                    020 7797 1222

Schroder Salomon Smith Barney

Philip Robert-Tissot             020 7986 4000

Brunswick

Derek Bainbridge

David Brewerton                  020 7404 5959

Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, which is regulated in the United Kingdom by The
Securities and Futures Authority Limited, is acting for London Stock Exchange
plc and no one else in connection with the offer by OM and will not be
responsible to anyone other than London Stock Exchange plc for providing the
protections afforded to its customers or for providing advice in relation to
the offer by OM. Schroder Salomon Smith Barney has approved this press release
for the purposes of Section 57 of the Financial Services Act 1986.