Boot(s) falls
Lets hope that footfall is not reduced at Boots as the victorious KKR team carve up their prize. Yes, that was terrible attempt at punning.
Charles Pretzlick in the Financial Times along with the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian & the Times give more details.
KKR and Stefano Pessina seem to have sewn up Alliance Boots with their £11.39-a-share dusk ‘n’ dawn raid buying 90 million shares in the past two days. They now hold 25.6 per cent of the company and will have to raise their offer to the price they paid in the market. That was clearly too tough a number for Terra Firma, Wellcome Trust and HBoS to beat – they have walked away.
The deal marks the first time that a member of the FTSE100 index of UK blue-chip stocks which employs more than 100,000 and has 2,600 healthcare outlets across the UK’s high streets and a further 350 outlets elsewhere in Europe and Asia has fallen to a private equity bid. As well as the High Street retail arm, the company is a wholesale supplier to more than 125,000 pharmacies, health centres and hospitals.
The KKR-Pessina offer values Alliance Boots at a 4.5 per cent premium to their original £10.90 a share offer, recommended last week by Sir Nigel Rudd, Boots’ chairman, and his board. It is 40 per cent above the price at which Boots shares were trading before the approach.
The FT uses this opportunity to call for public scrutiny of private equity.
Terra Firma said today: “Boots is a critically important national institution, and we are naturally disappointed not to be able to execute the bold vision we had for the company and its critical role in the provision of healthcare in the UK.”
I wonder if there is a plan B, especially with the BUPA hospitals still in play.
Anyway, it looks like Andy Burnham did not have an easy time after all at the Unison conference in Brighton. The BBC has it too.
Health minister Andy Burnham was booed and heckled by health workers today when he tried to defend the government’s policies on the NHS, which threaten to spark a summer of strikes.
Mr Burnham faced a wall of silence when he stood up to address Unison’s health workers’ conference in Brighton. Dozens of delegates held up posters which read “low pay, no way, NHS here to stay”, and there was regular heckling while the minister delivered his speech.
Care homes come under scrutiny by the joint Human Rights Committee with complaints of people being put into care homes that do not meet their needs and given the wrong drugs without their consent.
“We are seeing too many instances where it is accepted practice for old people to be treated in a low level way,” said charity boss Gary Fitzgerald.
The committee is examining the rights of old people in hospitals and homes.
It heard that people were being given the wrong medication - or medication was being used as a form of “chemical restraint” for dementia sufferers - which then became part of their routine care.
There was a “definite link” between over-medication and homes that were short staffed, the committee heard.
In a rare instance of an NHS trust actually listening to protesters, Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Trust today backed down over plans to close a midwife-led maternity unit following massive local pressure and government guidance promising every woman the option of such a delivery.
The trust had said it would have to shut the rural Darley Dale unit in Matlock, north Derbyshire, because, with just 120 babies born there each year, it was losing £312,000 annually.
The plan to permanently close the unit - which has been temporarily closed since the autumn - prompted 5,500 local people and the commissioning primary care trust to protest when it was announced as non-negotiable in a consultation document on revamping maternity services.
Today the trust bowed to this pressure - and to the threat, by the Maintain Our Maternity Services (Moms) campaign group, to seek a judicial review over the handling of the consultation.
The trust’s chief executive, Eric Morton said: “We have received around 7,000 individual replies to the consultation from local people and organisations… With over three-quarters of replies commenting solely on the Darley maternity unit, it was immediately clear we needed to make a decision about this.”
The unit, which had closed while midwives underwent training, will now reopen with at least three extra midwives recruited.