Murray Energy Corp. is taking advantage of a loophole to avoid cashing out creditors of an acquisition target, the second natural resources company to try that approach within the last year.

Murray will acquire 34 percent of the voting rights in a parent unit of Foresight Energy LP as part of the $1.37 billion takeover, down from 80 percent previously envisaged, while maintaining a 50 percent economic interest in the company, according to an April 7 statement. By altering the deal that way, Murray will no longer take voting control of Foresight and says therefore it won’t trigger a put option that would have required it to buy $600 million of the target’s bonds at 101 cents on the dollar.

The change comes after Murray struggled to raise debt for the purchase and to gain approvals from existing bondholders to sell new securities. The deal echoes the strategy of Sabine Oil & Gas LLC, which revised terms of its acquisition of Forest Oil Corp. in the same way on the day the deal closed in December.

“The more often that this is done and successfully, the greater the likelihood that it will be done in the future,” Ross Hallock, an analyst at researcher Covenant Review, said in a telephone interview. “Even if a company tells them they’re going to get their 101 put, there’s still a chance in the future that they can change the structure to avoid paying.”

Covenant Review said in December that Sabine’s circumvention of the put option was one of just two examples of this tactic in nine years and that it might be “used as precedent for other issuers to think about this structure.”

One key difference between the Murray deal and Sabine’s takeover of Forest is that Foresight bondholders don’t stand to lose much money. Their $600 million of 7.875 percent bonds due August 2021 have been trading near par since late February, even before the Murray deal was announced last month, and have never dipped below 95 cents on the dollar. Forest’s $1.5 billion of bonds lost nearly half their value on Dec. 16 when Sabine said its new deal structure wouldn’t trigger the notes’ change-of-control provisions. Forest’s 7.25 percent bonds due in June 2019 traded at 20.3 cents on the dollar this week.

Gary Broadbent, a spokesman for Murray, declined to comment beyond what the company has said in press statements. Jennifer Kroen, a spokeswoman at Foresight, declined to comment in an e-mail message.

Forest had said in July its bondholders would have the right to exercise their change-of-control put options. A third of those investors sued Sabine’s owner, First Reserve Corp., in February, claiming the revised acquisition cheated them out of $584 million. Meredith Mitchell, a spokeswoman for First Reserve at Prosek Partners, declined to comment.

Holders of Foresight’s 7.875 percent securities were offered a fee of 8 cents on the dollar on March 30 to waive the change-of-control provision that would’ve paid them 101 cents on the dollar if more than 35 percent of voting interests in parent Foresight Energy GP LLC were transferred. A March 30 statement announcing the solicitation said a “holder of greater than a majority” of the bonds had already agreed to the offer.

Foresight withdrew the consent solicitation on April 7 after the deal with Murray was revised.

The two companies haven’t yet proved whether or not they’ve avoided the change of control because they haven’t detailed Foresight Chairman Christopher Cline’s relationship with Murray, Covenant Review’s Hallock said.

Cline, who will join the Murray Energy board of directors, will retain a 66 percent voting interest in the Foresight parent company and 36 percent economic interest in the publicly traded part, according to an April 7 statement.

“It’s still an open question,” Hallock said. “If they’re partnering up with Mr. Cline, they need to carefully navigate the rules of what constitutes beneficial ownership.”