Nov 5, 2021
Rothermeres’ Daily Mail bid frogmarches investors to the exit
Investors in the paper's owner, Daily Mail and General Trust, know the feeling given the offer from the Rothermere family to buy the 72 per cent of the media group's non-voting stock that they don't already own, via their offshore holding company RCL. The irony is that this is a deal that fundamentally makes sense. An unexpected bid for catastrophe modelling business RMS, sold to Moody's for £1.4bn in August, and the listing of Cazoo, the online car site in which DMGT had a 20 per cent stake, left the group with a lot of cash and a shortage of places it wanted to invest it. Investors get 568p in cash after recent disposals, Cazoo shares worth 412p at Wednesday's close, a final dividend of 17.3p funded by the Rothermeres and an offer of 255p a share for the remaining newspaper and media assets. Investors might well welcome the return of funds that DMGT doesn't have good ways to invest. Majedie Asset Management, with 4.6 per cent of DMGT, thinks the largest businesses within the remainder of DMGT are worth double the 255p offer price.
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