Mark Kleinman: Could Wells Fargo bank on a megadeal with Barclays?
Mark Kleinman is Sky News’ City Editor and the man who gets the Square Mile talking in his Morning Wire column
Could Wells Fargo bank on a mega-deal with Barclays?
Now this really would liven up London’s M&A market. Since the turn of the year, the City rumour mill has persistently buzzed with talk of the biggest deal in global banking since the crisis of 2008 almost brought the global economy to its knees: a Wells Fargo takeover bid for Barclays.
In normal times, there might be reasons to think the idea of a transatlantic mega-banking consolidation play was credible. Firstly, the regulatory dividend that the largest US banks – including JP Morgan Chase, Citi and Wells Fargo – are anticipating from a rolling back of many of the most onerous reforms imposed on them after the financial crisis. A wave of changes, including reducing the G-SIB (Global Systemically Important Bank) surcharge levied on those lenders, will free up billions of dollars and make their balance sheets significantly more efficient. This has fuelled suggestions that US-based banks are preparing to consider industry-reshaping acquisitions.
Secondly, while Barclays is performing strongly under chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan, its market capitalisation of £58.4bn is a reflection of a company trading at just about book value – compared to about 1.7 times book value at Wells Fargo. The combination would also, analysts say, contain logic by growing the American group’s international corporate and investment banking franchise globally, one of Wells Fargo boss Charlie Scharf’s main strategic objectives.
Whether Wells Fargo would be keen to own one of Britain’s largest high street banks is more debatable. And in the context of Britain’s strained public finances and a potential lurch to the left if Sir Keir Starmer is replaced in the coming months, there are sound reasons to be sceptical about whether this would be the right time to mount a bid for one of Britain’s biggest corporate taxpayers.
There seems little doubt among senior industry figures that higher industry levies are inevitable after a bumper round of quarterly profits, regardless of any prime ministerial change. Geopolitical risks exacerbated by the war in Iran might also apply a brake to the idea of a transatlantic megadeal. But while both banks declined to comment, and there’s no suggestion of anything active going on, this is a situation to watch closely.
Alas, Smith and Jones amid high street gloom
Talk about an inevitability. The owners of TG Jones – still better known to you and me as WH Smith – were always going to turn to a formal restructuring of the high street retailer when they struck a cut-price deal to buy the chain last year. The biggest surprise is that it’s taken a full 12 months to deliver it (notwithstanding a clause in the transaction which made doing it sooner more complicated).
The final piece in the jigsaw enabling Modella Capital, TG Jones’s owner, to press the button on a restructuring plan came – as I revealed on Sky News – when it secured a new borrowing facility from the investment firm Aurelius.
Under the plans, which will require court approval, more than 100 TG Jones shops are expected to shut, with steep rent cuts being imposed on many of the remaining landlords. Many hundreds of jobs might go.
The alternative, though, looks worse. A pre-pack administration might achieve much the same outcome, but leave creditors even shorter-changed. And there is little guarantee that any investors would take a further punt on a high street business which appears to lack a coherent offer to consumers.
Assuming the restructuring plan is approved, it would undoubtedly be a sad chapter in the decline of a venerable high street name. But WH Smith, as it was, was struggling for decades, and its sale to a turnaround investor always felt like delaying the inevitable. Amid what sources say is truly dire trading, a restructuring plan for TG Jones is merely likely to offer another stay of execution, rather than the pathway to a full-blown renaissance.
LIV Golf needs a hole in one to escape post-Saudi funding albatross
How about this for the hardest assignment in global corporate finance right now? In agreeing to act as investment banking adviser to LIV Golf, US-based Ducera Partners probably holds that dubious accolade. Ducera will be tasked with replacing Saudi Arabia’s billions by the end of the year, even as LIV’s star players, including Bryson DeChambeau, weigh their professional futures.
In LIV’s press release announcing the bank’s appointment, chief executive Scott O’Neil claimed the league had “proven its value, and our focus now is on building the right financial foundation for the long term”.
Plenty of members of the golfing establishment have poured scorn on O’Neil’s assertion about LIV Golf having proved its value. By most people’s reckoning, Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has sunk more than $5bn into the project in the last five years, with precious little to show for it. An alliance with either the US PGA Tour or the European Tour is now critical to persuading investors to plough further funding into the league.
Described in LIV Golf’s announcement as a specialist in “complex high-stakes corporate finance”, Ducera – like a golfer facing a 12-foot putt to win a Major – will need to live up to its billing if the Saudi-funded tournament is not going to end the year in a bunker from which there’s no escape.