Liveris on the state of Dow Chemical

Business news junkies have been waiting for days for Dow Chemical Co.'s Andrew Liveris to speak about the company's future -- how it will deal with Kuwait's withdrawl from the K-Dow joint venture, and what that will mean to Dow's planned acquisition of Rohm and Haas Co. Liveris finally is starting to talk, and The Wall Street Journal has an excerpt of a Q&A interview with the CEO on its Web site today. Some highlights:

Dow believes it might get more than the $2.5 billion breakup fee from Kuwait for pulling out of the JV. Liveris said: "We will seek remedy for the damage done to Dow and we will seek it until we get remedy and that could be multiple billions of dollars and that could be any time frame this year or beyond."

He said there is "no deadline on the Rohm and Haas deal."

Watch for Dow to make some more asset divestments, and to find a new JV partner to replace the Kuwaitis.

On that front, here's what Liveris had to say:

We've already got two prospects who are working with us already. We believe within months we'll have a replacement to the Kuwaitis. This is a highly prized asset. This two years ago was sought after by many. We went exclusive with the Kuwaitis because they were our partners and because they really wanted the deal. The fact that they didn't want the deal last week is a shame, a tragedy, but almost the same day the announcement came out, we were contacted and we believe we'll have over a dozen interested parties in our process and within a matter of a month or two, we'll be down to a couple, and within two or three months we'll have one exclusive, and sometime in the first six months of the year, we will have a monetary and strategic answer to the Kuwaitis. That is a firm go-forward path.