Manchester billionaire tables £583m offer for property developer Harworth
Billionaire-owned Peel Group has tabled a £583m offer for Harworth as the property developer is poised to become the latest firm to exit the London Stock Exchange.
The offer of 172.5p per share represents a premium of 20.1 per cent compared to Harworth’s closing share price yesterday and a 36.9 per cent premium above the average share price over the past month.
Peel Group, which already owns around 30 per cent of Harworth’s shares, is itself majority-owned by Manchester billionaire John Whittaker.
Whittaker made his fortune from the sale of the Trafford shopping centre in Manchester in 2011 for £1.6bn, which set a record for the largest-ever property sale in Britain. The Bury-born businessman, who is thought to have a net worth of around £2bn, now resides in the Isle of Man.
Peel Group said it thought Harworth’s listing “provides limited benefit to the company” because its “highly concentrated shareholder register…impacts its share liquidity and limits growth.” Together, the largest three shareholders own more than 75 per cent of the business.
Peel Group said it believes “Harworth’s cash flow profile is increasingly becoming less sustainable” adding that “direct development and hold strategy to be capital-intensive, slow to deliver value and increasingly unable to generate appropriate risk-adjusted returns.”
Harworth has already seen its shares jump more than 10 per cent this week after it revealed plans to develop a new hyperscale data centre.
The Rotherham-based business said it had “entered advanced negotiations with several counterparties for the sale of the site”, for which it had already secured planning permission, adding that the transaction was likely to be more valuable than the £107m it pocketed from a previous land sale to Microsoft in 2024.
Chief executive Lynda Shillaw said the plan “underlines Harworth’s position as one of the most significant regional players in the rollout of the UK’s digital infrastructure, working with some of the largest operators in the industry.”