8:19 am, September 29, 2021
Cambria Bidco’s £82.5m offer to take Cambria Automobiles private has closed and a compulsory acquisition of outstanding shares will now take place.
An announcement posted on the London Stock Exchange this morning (Sept 29) said the company’s offer for the business had closed for further acceptances as of 1pm yesterday.
Cambria Bidco, led by current Cambria Automobiles boss Mark Lavery (pictured), has acquired 98.17 per cent (or 98,173,362 shares) of the dealer group.
As it has collected more than 90 per cent of shares, Cambria Bidco can now acquire compulsorily the remaining shares.
Earlier this month, shareholders had agreed to the management buy-out of Cambria Automobiles by Lavery after Cambria Bidco acquired 76.01 per cent of the dealer group’s shares.
It needed to pass the required 75 per cent acceptance threshold for the £82.5m offer to go through.
Although more backing wasn’t necessary, the offer was then left open for acceptances for a further 14 days – and that period ended at 1pm yesterday.
In August Mark Lavery told Car Dealer why he wants to take Cambria private
In August, Lavery spoke exclusively to Car Dealer and explained why he wanted to take the listed dealer group into private ownership – you can watch what he said in the video at the top of this story.
‘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,’ he said in the video at the top of this post.
He also said: ‘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.’
