Brierley loses battle, cries all the way to bank

Press, 9 October 1987, Page 17

Brierley loses battle, cries all the way to bank

By

NZPA staff

correspondent Helena Wisniewski

PA London Ron Brierley has agreed to sell most of his 29.6 per cent stake in bidtarget Equity and Law, after an agreement between the British insurer and rival French bidder, Compagnie du Midi. The French financial and insurance group said yesterday it had reached agreement with Equity and Law on the terms of an increased and recommended offer. The revised French offer is worth 455.6 p a share — compared with Brierley’s own offer of 450 p. The board of Equity and Law and the group’s financial advisers consider the terms of the

latest French offer to be "fair and reasonable,” and the board unanimously recommended shareholders to accept the revised offer. lEP Securities, a member of Brierely Investments, has sold a 7.87 per cent stake in Equity and Law to Compagnie du Midi and a 14.99 per cent stake to the merchant bank, Kleinwort Benson. It has also “given an irrevocable undertaking” to accept the revised offer for another 6.44 per cent, a Stock Exchange statement said. Kleinwort acts for Cie du Midi. The Stock Exchange had suspended all trading in Equity and Law in anticpation of an announcement. The E and L Shares, 453 p when suspended, returned to market at 443 p. Brierley may have lost the take-over battle but he does not walk away empty-handed. London City analysts put Brierley’s profit on tne long-running bid battle at a conservative

£3O million, after costs and expenses, equivalent to about SNZ7S million. “Selling the shareholding seemed like a sensible thing to do,” a spokesman for Schroders, Brierley advisers, said after the announcement. “I think he (Brierley) was happy to buy the company at the price he had said (450 p but he wasn’t prepared to pay

i any more for it.” The spokesman said Brierley had bought his Equity and Law stake of 296,000,000 shares at an | average price of 320 p a share, but he was unwilling to put a profit figure on the deal. “You have to remember, all the Equity and Law shareholders are also benefiting from this,” he told NZPA. Financial comentators in London said Mr Brierley was again “crying all the way to the bank” after the deal. It is the third major bid Mr Brierley has launched in Britain in the last year. His previous bids for Ocean Trading and Transport, and the engineering group Molins, were also unsuccessful. However, financial commentators in London said the third failure was not likely to damage Mr i Brierley’s credibility in Britain. They said he would be respected for having forced the French bidders to increase their offer

price, and for having made such a handsome profit out of the final deal. Mr Brierley, who was in London earlier this week, flew to Washington before the deal with Compagnie du Midi was announced. Brierleys made Its second offer of £453 million for Equity and Law last week when Compagnie du Midi bettered his opening shot, made earlier this summer, of £4OO million. The French company has always made it clear that it wanted to use Equity and Law as the springboard for its expansion in Europe after 1992, when the European Commission says the EEC financial market will be totally liberalised.

The French group wants to combine Equity and Law’s experience and expertise in the life assurance field, with its own involvement in other spheres of the insurance industry.