Deal means £700m windfall for Unilever founder’s family
THE desendants of William Hesketh Lever, the 19th Century grocer who pioneered a new kind of household soap in 1884, are in line for a £700m-plus windfall.
About 30 descendants will share £715m after the international company agreed a deal to purchase rights to 70.9m shares from the family trusts of William Hesketh Lever, the first Viscount Leverhulme.
The rights were due to convert to Unilever stock in 2038, but, in an effort to simplify its capital structure, the company has bought them back for the equivalent of £10.09 a share.
Bolton-born Lord Lever, who began making soap at Port Sunlight, left the rights on his death in 1925, just five years before Lever Brothers, the soap firm he founded with his younger brother James, merged with Margarine Unie to form Unilever.
The deal effectively cuts the Lever family’s ties with the FTSE 100 company.
Unilever’s chief financial officer Jean-Marc Huët said: “It is good for all our shareholders. “It is another step in the simplification of Unilever’s capital structure, making Unilever easier to understand, and eliminating ahead of time the burden of a significant dilution of shareholders’ interests.”
Sunlight soap, which was pioneered by the Lever brothers, was the world’s first packaged and branded soap. The product was on sale in 134 countries within a decade of its launch and is still part of Unilever today, sold as Vim, Quix and Svelto.
Lord Leverhulme became MP for the Liberal Party in the Wirral constituency and was a noted philanthropist, donating the land to build Bolton’s biggest park, Leverhulme Park and also endowing a school of tropical medicine at the University of Liverpool.
The Leverhulme Trust, Lord Leverhulme’s charitable body that donates grants for research and education, still has a 5.4% stake in Unilever.
Unilever, whose products include Flora margarine, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, PG Tips tea bags and Dove soap, has since grown into a company with a market value of almost £80bn.
