Asda takeover may force billionaire brothers to sell 50 petrol stations

The mergers watchdog has warned that the £6.8bn takeover of Asda by the billionaire Issa brothers could thrust costs up at the pump and demanded further assurances to reduce a total-blown investigation. 

The Levels of competition and Marketplaces Authority’s probe recognized 36 regions across the Uk the place the tie-up could direct to better costs for motorists. 

EG Team, the forecourt large owned by Mohsin and Zuber Issa, operates 395 petrol stations, though Asda owns 323 web pages. The brothers are to merge Asda’s web pages with their current forecourt empire in a separate £750m deal as component of their takeover of the supermarket.

The CMA only named one Asda superstore in Aberdeen as problematic.

Other regions the place the two corporations overlap, according to info from Altus, include things like: Birmingham, with two EG web pages and 6 Asda web pages Leeds, with four EG web pages and five Asda web pages Liverpool, with a few EG web pages and 6 Asda web pages and Manchester, with 7 EG web pages and eight Asda web pages. 

Levels of competition attorneys believed that the new homeowners of the supermarket chain would have to offer involving forty and fifty web pages to get the eco-friendly light from the regulator. 

Market veteran Gerald Ronson, who pioneered self-support petrol stations in the nineteen sixties, expressed an desire in buying some of the web pages to incorporate to his current 265 locations. 

“We’re in the current market to obtain the correct web pages. If they have web pages that they want to offer we would be delighted to have a seem at them. We don’t have any financial debt and we have significant income. We’re purchasers,” he explained.