City round up: NWF acquisition; Yourgene share tidy up; Boohoo completes Revolution Beauty coup

Cheshire-based farm supplies business NWF has made an acquisition of the trade and assets of Geoff Boorman Fuels from Geoff Boorman Fuels LLP, its second fuels acquisition in the last 12 months.  NWF wants to grow the fuels distribution business, in which it is the third largest player in the UK.

Geoff Boorman Fuels is a nineteen million litre fuel distributor based in Edenbridge, Kent with a largely domestic customer base. The acquisition complements Home Counties Fuels, the Group’s Kent based commercial fuel distribution operation thereby supporting the Group’s development in the South-East. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to underlying earnings of the Group, and the £2.6 million consideration has been paid in cash on completion from NWF’s existing cash resources.

NWF’s growth strategy is to both expand the geographic coverage of the fuels business within the UK and consolidate businesses adjacent to the existing depot network. NWF’s acquisition of Sweetfuels Limited (announced on 22 December 2022) has been integrated as planned and is performing well.

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Yourgene has issued 16,506,723 new ordinary shares in line with the acquisition of Coastal Genomics announced in August 2020 and has cancelled warrants over 54,332,541 new ordinary shares previously issued to Life Technologies, a division of Thermo Fisher.

The issue of equity and cancellation of warrants is being executed in order to simplify the Company’s capital structure ahead of the upcoming shareholder votes on the proposed acquisition of Yourgene by Novacyt announced on 3 July 2023.

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Boohoo has completed the deal to replace the board of Revolution Beauty, announced yesterday.

Ousted CEO Bob Holt and CFO Elizabeth Lake have, respectively, sold 2,557,895 and 1,335,789 shares to boohoo at a price of 32.625 pence per share, the amount paid is sufficient to cover the tax payable.

Lake will remain as CFO, Holt and director Derek Zissman will resign, but Holt will stay on as interim CEO until the end of August 2023.

Boohoo’s team of Alistair McGeorge, Neil Catto, Peter Hallett and former THG director Rachel Horsefield will join the board, with former Matalan and Littlewoods boss McGeorge being appointed as executive chairman with the others becoming independent non-executive directors.