If you are still wondering what Bestway and its owners are up to with their stakebuilding efforts in J Sainsbury then I suggest reading Neil "Neily" Craven's piece in yesterday's Mail on Sunday business section.
Neily has a go at figuring out what is actually going on with Bestway's move on Sainsbury's and arrives at a rather interesting suggestion: that perhaps Bestway are trying to engineer a reverse takeover...
The confirmations keep on coming for little old Betaville.
This morning FTSE 100-listed Ferguson announced it has struck a deal to sell plumbing merchant Wolseley to Clayton Dubilier & Rice, whose advisers include Sir Terry Leahy, for just over £300 million. Below is the link to the Ferguson statement:..
Three private equity firms are said to be in the running to buy Wolseley UK from FTSE 100-listed Ferguson.
People following the situation said Clayton Dubilier & Rice, Epiris and HIG Capital are competing in the final round of the Wolseley auction.
Final round bids for Wolseley are due in the next few days, said these people.
It's thought Wolseley, one of Britain's biggest building merchants, could change hands for between £400 million and £600 million...
There are a few pieces out this week from Bloomberg about how recent market turbulence is starting to hit dealmaking.
But it's still pretty lively in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Take, for example, this week's announcement from US giant Thermo Fisher about its $11.5 billion acquisition of Qiagen, the Dutch diagnostics testing group...
Is Morgan Stanley advising/financing GKSD and Gruppo San Donato on their potential bid for NMC Health?
The reason I posit this question is that there have been a series of disclosures suggesting that's the case without it being explicitly laid out. See below:..
The mischevious scamp who pens the excellent Prufrock diary column in The Sunday Times gave Ravi Gupta, the top Rothschild banker running the Cobham deal, a bit of a shoeing this weekend.
Liam Kelly unveiled the expensive contents of Mr Gupta's rather large house in Hampstead, North London, and then noted he was responsible for selling off Britain's largest industrial businesses, such as Cobham, to any predator willing to pay a sum...
This piece in The Daily Telegraph's business section - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/05/27/rothschild-chasing-big-dollars-across-pond/ - about the venerable NM Rothschild expanding in the US caught Betaville's eye.
Why?..
I see former The Sunday Times colleague, Simon Duke, is being rather mean to NM Rothschild banker Majid Ishaq in today's business diary in The Times.
Dukey gently mocks Ishaq, the man in charge of advising Asda on its merger with J Sainsbury, for a potential loss of a multi-million pound success fee after it became clear the CMA is likely to block the mega deal. Below is a link to Simon's piece:..
The dreaded "Brexit uncertainty" seems to be dominating every aspect of media business coverage at the moment, including deals and dealmakers.
But there is one private equity firm that appears to be keen to continue in buying UK businesses no matter what: Lloyds Development Capital, the private equity wing of Lloyds Banking Group...
I broke the story back in January in The Sunday Times about 3i hiring NM Rothschild to flog Hobbs (see the link below), so it's good to see a deal with South African group Foschini has finally been confirmed.
Below is the link to the piece I wrote earlier this year:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hobbs-on-the-block-kq9nc739x..