The City financier Edi Truell has tabled a fresh proposal to buy De La Rue, the Bank of England’s currency printer, fuelling hopes of a broader bidding war for the 211-year-old company.
Sky News has learnt that Mr Truell’s vehicle, Pension SuperFund Capital, wrote to the board of De La Rue on Monday night to indicate its willingness to offer 132.17p-a-share for De La Rue.
If formally confirmed, that would trump a recommended 130p-a-share offer from private equity firm Atlas Holdings disclosed by Sky News and confirmed by the London-listed company in a statement on Tuesday morning.
The Atlas bid values De La Rue at about £263m.
It was unclear where Mr Truell’s financing for a bid was being obtained, but his latest proposal follows a 125p-a-share proposal tabled in January.
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Mr Truell declined to comment when contacted by Sky News.
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De La Rue, which has been listed in London since 1947, has been conducting a formal sale process for several months.
The offer from Atlas Holdings does not include De La Rue’s authentication division, which is being sold to US-listed Crane NXT in a £300m transaction, which took a further step towards completion last week.
The proceeds from that deal have been earmarked to repay debt and reduce its pension scheme deficit.
De La Rue’s currency arm prints money for a large number of central banks around the world, including in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe.
It has printing sites in the UK, Kenya, Malta and Sri Lanka.
In 2020, the Bank of England announced that it had extended De La Rue’s contract from the end of 2025 until 2028.
At the time, there were 4.4bn Bank of England notes in circulation with a collective value of about £82bn.
De La Rue’s directors have been exploring options in recent months to maximise value for long-suffering shareholders, including a standalone sale of the currency-printing business or other proposals to acquire the entire company.
The group’s balance sheet has been under strain for years, with doubts at one point about whether it could stave off insolvency.
After being beset by a series of corporate mishaps, including a string of profit warnings, a public row with its auditor and challenges in its operations in countries including India and Kenya, it was forced to seek breathing space from pension trustees by deferring tens of millions of pounds of payments into its retirement scheme.
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Soon after that, the company parachuted in Clive Whiley, a seasoned corporate troubleshooter, as chairman, with a mandate to repair its battered finances.
Since then, its stock has recovered strongly, with its shares up nearly 15% on Tuesday after confirmation of Atlas Holdings’ bid.
De La Rue traces its roots back to 1813, when Thomas De La Rue established a printing business.
Eight years later, he began producing straw hats and then moved into printing stationery, according to an official history of the company.
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Its first paper money was produced for the government of Mauritius in 1860, and in 1914, it began printing 10-shilling notes for the UK government on the outbreak of the First World War.
