Greencore may compete against IAWS as OFT forces Spillers' sale

Philip Lynch has finally come out into the open and signalled that IAWS is interested in bidding for the four Spillers flour …

Philip Lynch has finally come out into the open and signalled that IAWS is interested in bidding for the four Spillers flour mills in Britain that Tomkins is being forced to sell by the Office of Fair Trading.

Whether the IAWS boss is really interested in buying four flour mills at a likely cost of over £60 million or whether he is really interested in bidding for a couple of the mills most conveniently located for his new £15 million Cuisine de France plant in Britain, remains to be seen.

But it is pretty certain that Greencore will be another interested party when the Spillers plants come up for grabs in the next few weeks. And indeed it is perfectly conceivable that the bidding for the flour mills could become a two-pronged affair between IAWS and Greencore.

This affair is a serious embarrassment for Tomkins boss, Greg Hutchings, who bought the Spillers mills from Kerry for £108 million without making the deal subject to approval from the regulators. Normally deals like this are conditional on approval from the OFT, but it seems that Tomkins was so keen to beat off Garry Weston's ABF, and it seems, Greencore and IAWS, that it made an unconditional offer to Denis Brosnan for the Spillers mills.

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The company now has large dollops of egg on his face after the OFT flatly rejected his pleas for the deal to be approved. But down in Tralee, Denis Brosnan must be sitting back with a very large smile on his face! And as for IAWS and Greencore, they both get a second chance to bid for some or all of the four Spillers mills on the block.