Financier Truell prints new supply in battle for banknote agency De La Rue

The Metropolis financier Edi Truell has tabled a recent proposal to purchase De La Rue, the Financial institution of England’s forex printer, fuelling hopes of a broader bidding warfare for the 211-year-old firm.

Sky Information has learnt that Mr Truell’s automobile, Pension SuperFund Capital, wrote to the board of De La Rue on Monday night time to point its willingness to supply 132.17p-a-share for De La Rue.

If formally confirmed, that will trump a really useful 130p-a-share supply from personal fairness agency Atlas Holdings disclosed by Sky Information and confirmed by the London-listed firm in an announcement on Tuesday morning.

The Atlas bid values De La Rue at about £263m.

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Mr Truell declined to remark when contacted by Sky Information.

De La Rue, which has been listed in London since 1947, has been conducting a proper sale course of for a number of months.

The supply from Atlas Holdings doesn’t embrace De La Rue’s authentication division, which is being offered to US-listed Crane NXT in a £300m transaction, which took an additional step in the direction of completion final week.

The proceeds from that deal have been earmarked to repay debt and cut back its pension scheme deficit.

De La Rue’s forex arm prints cash for numerous central banks all over the world, together with within the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe.

It has printing websites within the UK, Kenya, Malta and Sri Lanka.

In 2020, the Financial institution of England introduced that it had prolonged De La Rue’s contract from the top of 2025 till 2028.

On the time, there have been 4.4bn Financial institution of England notes in circulation with a collective worth of about £82bn.

De La Rue’s administrators have been exploring choices in current months to maximise worth for long-suffering shareholders, together with a standalone sale of the currency-printing enterprise or different proposals to accumulate all the firm.

The group’s stability sheet has been beneath pressure for years, with doubts at one level about whether or not it might stave off insolvency.

After being beset by a collection of company mishaps, together with a string of revenue warnings, a public row with its auditor and challenges in its operations in international locations together with India and Kenya, it was pressured to hunt respiration area from pension trustees by deferring tens of hundreds of thousands of kilos of funds into its retirement scheme.

Quickly after that, the corporate parachuted in Clive Whiley, a seasoned company troubleshooter, as chairman, with a mandate to restore its battered funds.

Since then, its inventory has recovered strongly, with its shares up practically 15% on Tuesday after affirmation of Atlas Holdings’ bid.

De La Rue traces its roots again to 1813, when Thomas De La Rue established a printing enterprise.

Eight years later, he started producing straw hats after which moved into printing stationery, in accordance with an official historical past of the corporate.

Its first paper cash was produced for the federal government of Mauritius in 1860, and in 1914, it started printing 10-shilling notes for the UK authorities on the outbreak of the First World Conflict.