G4S fends off Allied Universal takeover as prospect of bidding war hots up
A new contender has entered the fray in the attempt to take over outsourcing firm G4S, it was revealed this morning.
The FTSE 250 firm said that it had rejected a 210p per share offer to buyout the company from American firm Allied Universal.
Shares in the company rose 3.9 per cent to 212.7p.
The surprise bid raises the prospect of a bidding war for the UK firm, which has already fended off multiple offers from Canadian company Gardaworld.
In a statement released earlier, G4S’ board said it had received the “highly conditional offer” back in October and had rejected it.
As with Gardaworld’s offers of 190p per share, it said that the proposal “significantly undervalues” G4S. The offer was first reported by Bloomberg.
Last week G4S’ chair John Connolly slammed Gardaworld over its repeated attempts to effect a buyout of the security firm.
He said that the Canadian company, which is considerably smaller than G4S, “desperately needed” access to its balance sheet in order to finance the acquisition.
“Meeting their needs should not be at the expense of our shareholders and key stakeholders.
“Gardaworld has quite simply failed to articulate why your company’s employees and stakeholders should support an acquisition that would be over ten times the size of Gardaworld’s largest acquisition to date”, Connolly added.
Gardaworld’s relentless pursuit of G4S has seen it have two offers rejected already. In June, it first bid at 145p per share and then followed up with an improved 153p per share offer.
In response to today’s announcement, Gardaworld chief exec Stephen Cretier accused G4S of “shadowboxing”.
He poured scorn on the offer, saying: “Any sophisticated shareholder will immediately see the insuperable antitrust issues Allied would face in the US.
“It is also hard to imagine Allied’s largest shareholder, CDPQ, supporting a non-conditional offer with G4S’s ESG failings and its blacklisted status with several major pension funds.
“Unlike Allied, which has made a ‘highly conditional indicative offer subject to substantial due diligence requirements,’ our financing is real, our offer is a matter of public record and our intent is serious.”
Despite the G4S board’s continued confidence in the company’s prospects, the dragging takeover battle has left employees nervous.
According to the FT staff at the London-listed firm have written to Gardaworld urging them to commit to securing jobs in the event that the £3bn takeover goes through.