Dunloe House, the property company controlled by Dublin solicitor, Mr Noel Smyth, has launched its official £21.1 million sterling (£25 million) bid for Ewart, the Belfast property company. As the terms are unchanged from the initial offer, the bid will be firmly rejected by the Ewart board yet again. Ewart's managing director, Mr Barry Gilligan told The Irish Times: "The board has rejected a similar offer. I have no reason to believe that the board will do anything other than to reject this."

However, Dunloe chairman Mr Smyth who owns 26.01 per cent of Ewart with a market value of £7.58 million (his 25.8 per cent holding in Dunloe is valued at £18.1 million) warns that the Ewart share price which has increased to 77.5p sterling (it closed at 85p on the Irish market yesterday) since the initial announcement "would not be sustainable in the absence of the offer". Dunloe says the offer "which is at a premium to the audited net assets at June 30th, 1997, after eliminating capitalised goodwill, is full and fair". It supports this view saying the historic performance of Ewart has been disappointing and points out that the net assets per share have been increased by only 1 per cent in the three years to June 1997.

Dunloe believes that "this rate of growth can be significantly improved with Ewart as part of an enlarged Dunloe Group".

The offer will initially be open for acceptances until January 28th.

"While no revision is envisaged," the document says "if the offer is revised" it will be open for a further period. This allows it to increase the offer. The offer is conditional of acceptances over 90 per cent "or such lesser percentage as Dunloe may decide". This allows Dunloe to declare success at 51 per cent. Ewart now has 14 days to issue a response document.