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Cape Town - The boxing gloves have been donned in the fight for control of KWV, with a possible third bid for the company’s shares in the offing.
This comes after Pioneer Food Group [JSE:PFG] and the offshore liquor company Halewood previously expressed their intentions to take over KWV.
On Friday the fight for control of KWV rippled further outward when Danie de Wet, former KWV chairperson, made a formal offer to take over the KWV shares held by VinPro, the cooperative division of the old KWV, at R12.05/share – after Pioneer Foods had offered R12.
On Thursday KWV’s board of directors met for six hours to discuss developments affecting the company.
Among the items on the agenda were the questions of who had been responsible for leaking information to the outside world about the possible takeover of the company, the company’s asset value and the fact that all of the board members had been unaware that informal discussions had been held with Halewood for the past 18 months.
KWV chairperson Thys du Toit had to explain why the earlier talks with Halewood had not been made public.
Sake24 ascertained that KPMG’s valuation of KWV shares had been downgraded from more than R12/share to between R10 and R11/share.
The KWV board had also decided to ask Pioneer Foods to come up with a formal offer to take over the company within 30 days.
On Friday Pioneer Foods indicated that it would issue an official explanation of its position with regard to KWV, but it had not done so.
Meanwhile Sake24 also discovered that Halewood was not necessarily interested in taking over the whole of KWV, but wanted to concentrate only on certain brands that fitted its business model. It appeared that the company would be prepared to negotiate with Pioneer Foods about a possible splitting of KWV’s assets.
Sake24 was meanwhile told that the relationship between the PSG/Zeder, Kaap Agri, Pioneer Foods and KWV boards was somewhat intermeshed and that there was so much overlap that the objectivity of the whole process appeared suspect.
- Sake24
For business news in Afrikaans, go to www.sake24.com.
