EasyHotel takeover bid succeeds
Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou has lost his battle to prevent a takeover of easyHotel, the budget chain he founded in 2004.
A consortium made up of property investors ICAMAP, from Luxembourg, and Ivanhoe Cambridge, from Canada, announced yesterday that it had received enough acceptances of its 95p per share offer to give it a majority stake in the company.
Its offer values the company’s shares at £139 million.
The remaining shareholders have until September 17 to accept the offer, which has been recommended by easyHotel’s board as ‘fair and reasonable’ despite Sir Stelio’s claim that the consortium was ‘simply trying to steal this company from under the noses of other investors’.
On Wednesday, the bidding companies said they either hold or have received acceptances for shares carrying more than 50% of easyHotel’s voting rights.
Sir Stelios said the price they paid gave no value to the business beyond its bricks-and-mortar assets. The billionnaire entrepreneur has been attempting to increase his stake from 27.5% to just under 30% — the limit after which an investor has to launch a formal takeover bid — ahead of the September 17 deadline for final acceptances of the offer.
However, by yesterday he had only managed to buy 10,000 shares at 95p and another 9,359 shares at 96p, which Sir Stelios said was~proof that ICAMAP and Ivanhoe Cambridge had undervalued the company and were buying out other shareholders ‘on the cheap’.
The bidding consortium’s latest offer was more than a previous tender of 70.5p per share.
Sir Stelios said he wanted to prevent the consortium from taking the company private by acquiring more than 75% of the business.
In a statement at the time of the offer announcement Harm Meijer, managing director of ICAMAP, said that the fund manager had been a shareholder since 2016 and supported two capital raising initiatives. "However, we also believe that the company needs a change in its shareholder base in order for easyHotel to become a true leading pan-European budget hotel player," he said.
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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