The Spirit Group has won the auction to buy Scottish & Newcastle's (S&N's) managed estate of pubs, restaurants and budget hotels for £2.5b, beating early favourite the Laurel Pub Company, which switched backers from Nomura to Cinven and Morgan Stanley during the bidding.
To clinch the deal, Spirit created a new consortium, Spirit Amber, backed by Texas Pacific, Blackstone Group, CVC Capital Partners and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity. The sale, which should complete in mid-November, adds S&N's 1,406 managed outlets, including 131 Premier Lodge hotels and the Chef & Brewer, John Barras and T&J Bernard brands, to Spirit's 1,100 managed pubs. It will add some 29,000 people to the Spirit payroll.
Spirit chairman Tony Campbell dismissed as premature reports that Spirit will sell Premier Lodge to Whitbread or InterContinental Hotels Group and 300 smaller pubs to Punch Taverns. He said, however, that it was possible Spirit might keep the budget hotels division, with which it was very impressed.
- Rumours are rife that Punch Taverns is deep in talks to buy Pubmaster's 3,200-strong tenanted estate for an estimated £1.2b. Pubmaster admitted the two had been talking in recent weeks but said there was nothing to announce.