Do the right thing
For more than a year, the City has tried to persuade (and believe us, there are ways and ways of persuasion) Scottish & Newcastle to give up being vertically integrated and sell its last 1,450 pubs. Now that it has done as told, put all its pubs up for auction and bought the troubled cider maker HP Bulmer for £278 million including net debt of £91 million, the hard-nosed bankers feigned surprise. Ah well. It’s done. What makes the rest of the world sit up now is whether some City’s pundits will be proven right and S&N will indeed become a target for a bid from Anheuser-Busch (A-B) or SABMiller.
But first things first. The auction of S&N’s pub estate. Analysts have insisted for a long time that S&N could only maximise shareholder value if it sold all of its pubs.3 billion..
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