Call for probe into Benetton duty-free sale

Italian regulators have been urged to investigate the auction that led to the Benetton family agreeing to sell World Duty Free group for €3.6bn to a Swiss buyer, amid allegations that the family holding ignored a substantially higher offer from a Chinese bidder.

The Benettons hold a 50.1 per cent stake in WDF through Edizione, the family holding company, allowing it to overrule minority shareholders.

In March, the holding company said it had agreed to sell the international airport retailer to Dufry, a Swiss rival, for €10.25 a share, rejecting offers from two other bidders.

The deal, if completed, would create the world's biggest travel retail group, with duty-free stores in hubs such as London Heathrow, New York's John F Kennedy airport, Madrid, Barcelona, Moscow and Sao Paulo.

According to documents seen by the Financial Times, one of the bidders - the Chinese Boyu group - offered to take over the company at a price of €12.30 a share, a premium of 20 per cent over the winning bid.

That discrepancy is at the centre of a formal complaint sent by a Spanish minority shareholder to Consob, the Italian stock market regulator.

The complaint urges Consob to open a "full investigation on this matter as it is obvious there was a better offer in the market".

Speaking after the deal was announced, Gianmario Tondato da Ruos, the chairman of WDF, acknowledged that the company had received higher bids.

"The problem was that they were all conditional," he told the Moodie Report.

But a representative of Boyu, which operates the duty-free shops at Beijing and Shanghai airports, denied there was a difference in conditionality. "The conditions presented in our offer were not different at all from those given in the winning offer."

A spokesman for Italy's stock market regulator Consob said that it had received the emailed complaint from the Spanish minority investor.

The spokesman added that Consob was undertaking the normal process of investigation of the offer on WDF as the regulator would in any takeover situation.

Italy has become a major target for Chinese investors and outranked the US and the UK as the main destination for Chinese outbound investment over the past 12 months by value following a €7bn deal struck in March for ChemChina to take over Italian tyres group Pirelli.

The slew of successful deals by Chinese investors in Italy, where asset prices have fallen during a three-year recession and a new government has pursued a more open investment policy, have underlined rapidly improving Chinese outbound dealmaking skills over the past two years, say bankers, although they admit some anomalies.

NIT Holding, a Hong Kong-based group, issued a statement last year saying it was ready to put €10bn into Italy's third-largest bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena, putting a rocket under the lender's shares.

Monte Paschi subsequently issued a statement the terms of the offer were so vague and imprecise that it could not be taken seriously by the board.

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