Dell Inc.’s financial whizz kids are working overtime to find a way to tie up the company’s mooted $67 billion acquisition of storage giant EMC Corp. without upsetting that company’s shareholders. In the latest feat of financial engineering, the Texas-based firm says it could spend a minimum of $3 billion in order to buy back VMware Inc.’s rather awkward ‘tracking stock’, Reuters reported.

There’s been a lot of focus on the tracking stock part of the deal. The idea came about because EMC owns 80 percent of VMware. If and when Dell does buy EMC, the newly created tracking stock would allow EMC shareholders to receive fair value for the company’s holding in VMware when Dell offers some of the virtualization giant’s shares for sale.

The plan would see EMC shareholders receiving 0.111 percent of each VMware tracking share for each EMC share they own. The thinking was that this would provide value to EMC shareholders without actually paying them cash or giving them shares in VMware directly, as VMware’s share value was appreciating faster than its parent company’s stock at the time the deal was first announced.

But now it’s all going a bit pear-shaped, because VMware’s stock has collapsed by almost 30 percent since the Dell/EMC merger was announced. Analysts say VMware’s stock decline is a direct consequence of the Dell/EMC deal, and also the Virtustream joint venture plan between EMC and VMware, which has since been cancelled by the latter firm.

According to Reuters, the plan to buy back tracking stock was announced by Dell in an SEC filing, where it said it could spend $3 billion or more to buy back VMware tracking stock, if its net income rises high enough. In most cases, stock buybacks are initiated as a measure to buy a company’s own shares so that investors own fewer of them. The result of this is it usually raises a company’s earnings-per-share (EPS) measure, which refers to its profit divided by the number of outstanding shares. Investors use EPS measures as a way of rating the attractiveness of a company’s stock, with a higher rating usually leading to a higher value.

If and when the EMC deal does go through, Dell’s main focus will be on reducing the whopping $49.5 billion debt burden its taken on, which suggests those who hold VMware tracking stock may have to wait a while before the company does initiate any buybacks.