- Late this morning Roc Private Equity offered $1.25 or $346M
- Early afternoon saw MAFM offer $1.26 or $348M
- No further announcements made
Late this morning, Vitalharvest (ASX: VTH) enter a pause in trading ahead of an announcement.
That announcement: Roc Private Equity modified its binding offer to $1.25 per unit or $346.25 million in a Vitalharvest asset sale. This represents a one cent premium on the previous offer that VTH had accepted from Macquarie Agricultural Funds Management (MAFM), not the knock out offer that Roc had tried twice before, and is the sixth offer by Roc.
Shortly afterwards another announcement was made, but it was not a response by MAFM. Instead, The Trust Company, part of Perpetual Limited, stated that Mary Kapota had been appointed as “an additional Company Secretary of the Responsible Entity [The Trust Company] effective today”.
Ms Kapota is the third Company Secretary for The Trust Company, alongside Sylvie Dimarco and Gananatha Minithantri.
Some two to three hours after the first pause in trading, another was made.
This time it was a MAFM response to the Roc Private Equity, a counter riposte of another one cent premium.
Macquarie’s seventh proposal to Vitalharvest now sits at $1.26 per unit or in the asset sale alternative where unitholders vote against the first option, $348.1 million, a nearly two million dollar increase on Roc Private Equity.
At time of publication, the unit price for Vitalharvest was $1.285, a few cents more than the proposed takeover unit prices whilst Primewest (ASX: PWG), the company managing Vitalharvest, saw share prices drop from the morning high of $1.46 to $1.44, just after the Roc announcement, the price fluctuated but remained the same when MAFM announced its counter offer.
For more background on the berry bidding battle, click here.
In other related agricultural real estate news, Primewest’s Agricultural Trust No. 1 secured three new properties across Victoria and South Australia for a total of circa $40 million. The trust total assets now wit at $86 million.
