InBev’s attempt to buy Anheuser-Busch faced another obstacle yesterday as the American owner of Budweiser asked a court to block the Belgian brewer’s proposed $47 billion (£23.8 billion) takeover.

Anheuser-Busch filed a complaint at a federal court in St Louis, Missouri, which claimed that InBev had launched a hostile takeover bid based on “numerous false and misleading statements” about how the deal would be financed and how the company would be run after the acquisition.

The legal action, filed in the Eastern District of Missouri, where Anheuser-Busch has its headquarters, seeks an injunction to stop InBev from taking more steps to install a board that may be more open to a deal until InBev has corrected its false statements.

Anheuser alleged in its action that it was “materially misleading” for InBev to tout its financing as fully committed because any commitments “are certainly rife with conditions”, allowing the proposed lenders to walk away in certain conditions.

The legal action is the latest twist in an increasingly complex takeover bid and comes days after shareholders in Anheuser-Busch had filed lawsuits seeking to force the company to consider fairly the offer.

Anheuser-Busch rejected InBev’s unsolicited bid at the end of June, saying that it was too low. The company outlined an alternative plan to cut $1 billion in costs in an attempt to boost its profits and appease investors.

In another legal action, the shareholders said that Anheuser-Busch’s board had breached its fiduciary responsibility by failing to consider and respond to InBev’s offer. That lawsuit asks the court to prevent Anheuser-Busch directors “from entrenching themselves and causing the company to take unreasonable and disproportionate defensive measures”.

It also requested that the court move to prevent Anheuser-Busch from negotiating to acquire the half of Grupo Modelo, a Mexican brewer, that it does not already own, amid concerns that the deal would make the combined entity too large for InBev, or any other potential bidder, to buy.

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