Hands set for £50m pubs sale bonus

DEALMAKER Guy Hands is on the verge of raking in a £50m bonus by selling Nomura's 4,300 pubs to Enterprise Inns for £2bn. Enterprise's backers, private equity firms Cinven and Legal & General Ventures, were last night finalising terms with Nomura's top financier.

Its bid topped an offer from the rival Punch Pub Company. Bids were submitted on Sunday ahead of Wednesday's deadline imposed by Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, handling the auction.

The acquisition of Nomura's Unique and Voyager pub chains will more than double the size of Enterprise, the only listed tenanted pub group. By linking with Cinven and L&G, it was able to move fast. It will manage the pubs, and has sunk £100m into the consortium, avoiding a rights issue for the time being. It has an option to buy the estates in two years from Cinven and L&G. Enterprise rose 1p to 658p.

Punch was putting a brave face on its disappointment. Chief executive Giles Thorley used to run Unique and was keen on a deal. The private pub operator will now concentrate on getting its planned flotation under way.

Hands, with an estimated personal fortune of £200m, is off to manage his own finance fund at the end of this month. He put Voyager and Unique up for sale straight after selling Nomura's Inn Partnership chain to Pubmaster, making the Japanese bank a £160m profit.

Hands's new fund, Terra Firma, aims to raise £2bn. The 42-year-old, who has a mansion in Kent, earned massive rewards as head of Nomura's Principal Finance. He has a record of taking unglamorous businesses and selling them on at a hefty profit. Firms bought include the William Hill betting chain and Thorn's TV rental business.