IRC bidders take 75% stake
THE consortium looking to take restaurant chain Individual Restaurant Company private has gained more than three quarters of its shares, which is enough to make its offer unconditional.
W2D2 Ltd, a firm set up by IRC chief executive Steven Walker and Iceland founder Malcolm Walker with fellow investors Tarsem Dhaliwel and Paul Dawes, already had 53.63% of the shares when its takeover offer was announced on April 21.
Since then, they have gained control of a further 22.14% of the shares, bringing the total under their control to 75.77%.
As a result, the consortium’s offer of £5.67m for the company – or 9.5p per share, just 1p more than the closing price on the day the offer was announced – has now been declared wholly unconditional and the consortium has said that it now plans to delist. The offer was not given a formal recommendation by the board’s non-executive directors.
Individual Restaurant Company has 33 restaurants in the UK – 11 of which operate under the Restaurant Bar & Grill brand and 22 operate as Piccolino’s.
The firm is due to hold its AGM today, and in a statement ahead of the meeting chairman Robert Breare has said that the like-for-like sales growth achieved during the first three months of the year had continued over the following six weeks to May 15.
However, he said that the positive margins achieved had been “significantly eroded by cost inflation” and that prices of alcohol, beef, dairy and other produce were likely to continue rising over the rest of the year.
“The ability of the group to absorb most, if not all, of these inflationary pressures will depend upon the buoyancy of consumer spending going forward,” he said.
