2:46 pm, September 6, 2021
The deadline for Mark Lavery’s management buyout of Cambria Automobiles has been extended by a week after the voting threshold was missed.
Bidco, led by Lavery, had tabled an offer of £82.5m for the dealer group, and it had to get the approval of 75 per cent of shareholders.
However, it narrowly missed out on the threshold late last week, achieving 74.76 per cent, including the 40 per cent owned by Lavery and his wife Nicola, by the initial deadline of 1pm on September 3.
An update to the London Stock Exchange this morning (Sept 6) said a new deadline of 1pm on September 10 was now in place, with an additional 241,141 shares needed to reach the 75 per cent threshold.
If the figure still isn’t reached by then, Lavery can announce a further extension.
Last month, Lavery gave an exclusive interview with Car Dealer where he outlined the reasons for taking the business private.
In the video, which you can watch at the top of this story, he said that being a public company ‘hadn’t really worked’.
‘We were listed on the London Stock Exchange just over a decade ago at 50p per share, and a decade later, in April 2020, were down to 33p.
‘It makes you wonder what you’ve been doing for the past 15 years.’
Lavery also said: ‘‘And myself and the directors were questioning, well, if it’s not working for us, then can it be working for the shareholders? We came to the conclusion that actually, no, it doesn’t.
‘So, what do we see the future as? We spent a bit of time looking at it from a personal point of view – my family’s the biggest shareholder – and we decided that Cambria would flourish better in a private environment than it would do in the public domain.
‘And that’s the position we find ourselves in today.’
The statement issued to the London Stock Exchange reminded shareholders that Bidco’s £82.5m cash offer is ‘final’ and ‘will not be increased’ unless an offer for Cambria is issued by a third party.
