Three-way bid for Young's Seafood

THREE businesses are bidding to buy Young’s Seafood, including one of its former owners, weekend reports have suggested.
The Sunday Telegraph said yesterday that the £200 million sale of Britain’s largest frozen and chilled seafood company was nearing completion.
The current private equity owners, led by Lion Capital, announced in April that they were putting Young’s up for sale.
Now it emerges that CapVest, another private equity business, which bought Young’s in a £137 million deal in 2002 and sold it off six years later, may want to be reunited with its former partner. CapVest also bought Findus before Lion Capital offloaded it to Nomad Foods for £500 million three and a half years ago.
Another bidder, already reported by Fish Update, is the giant Japanese Mitsubishi Corporation, which has a separate food division, and owns the Norwegian salmon farmer Cermaq.
The third contender named on Sunday is UK Fisheries, an organisation of interests in England and Scotland which owns white fish quotas around the country.
The sale of Young’s is expected to be completed by late next month or early October. Since the sale was first announced, the Grimsby based company has been carrying out a major restructuring of its manufacturing operations.
It has announced the closure of its salmon site, Pinneys of Annan, with the loss of 450 jobs, moving salmon production to Grimsby.
The Pinneys site is already shedding workers, with closure expected by the end of October, two months earlier than previously announced.
Young’s, which employs almost 2,000 people, then spent £1.5 million buying a 13-acre site in Grimsby, which has been earmarked for future expansion.