Ahold, the Dutch food retail group, has successfully completed its tender offers for the outstanding shares in Chilean supermarket chain Santa Isabel.
Ahold already held 70.2 per cent of Santa Isabel prior to the offer, and the latest purchase of both the company's common and American Depository Shares (ADSs), each representing 15 Santa Isabel shares) will give the Dutch group 97 per cent of the Chilean firm.
The tender offers were made through Ahold's wholly owned subsidiaries, Gestion, Rentas e Inversiones Apoquindo Limitada (GRIAL) and Disco Ahold International Holdings (DAIH). GRIAL made a tender offer in Chile for the shares but not the ADSs, while DAIH made a concurrent tender offer in the US for shares held by US holders and for the ADSs.
Ahold said that a total of 138,206,875 shares were tendered in Chile, while 1,328,303 ADSs were tendered in the US. No shares were offered in the United States.
Ahold said it would pay for all the tendered shares on 6 October.
The Dutch group's acquisition of Santa Isabel has not been without its controversy. The offer for the outstanding shares in Santa Isabel became obligatory when Ahold took over Disco Ahold International Holdings buy buying out its former partner in that company, Velox Retail Holdings. That took Ahold's stake in Santa Isabel over the 66 per cent threshold set by Chilean law and made an offer obligatory.
But one of the minority shareholders in the Chilean chain went to the courts in a bid to force Ahold to pay more for the outstanding shares than the "more than fair" offer of 190 pesos per share offered by the Dutch firm, claiming that the Chilean firm's management was pressurised into accepting the offer.
Santa Isabel itself denied those claims, and the sale of the shares went ahead as planned.