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 prices up at the pump and demanded additional assurances to stop a complete-blown investigation. 

The Competitors and Markets Authority’s probe determined 36 regions throughout the British isles where the tie-up could lead to bigger prices for motorists. 

EG Team, the forecourt giant owned by Mohsin and Zuber Issa, operates 395 petrol stations, though Asda owns 323 websites. The brothers are to merge Asda’s websites with their present forecourt empire in a independent £750m offer as section of their takeover of the supermarket.

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

Other regions where the two corporations overlap, according to facts from Altus, include things like: Birmingham, with two EG websites and six Asda websites Leeds, with four EG websites and five Asda websites Liverpool, with 3 EG websites and six Asda websites and Manchester, with 7 EG websites and eight Asda websites. 

Competitors lawyers believed that the new house owners of the supermarket chain would have to sell in between forty and fifty websites to get the environmentally friendly mild from the regulator. 

Market veteran Gerald Ronson, who pioneered self-support petrol stations in the 1960s, expressed an desire in acquiring some of the websites to insert to his present 265 locations. 

“We’re in the marketplace to obtain the suitable websites. If they have websites that they want to sell we would be delighted to have a appear at them. We never have any financial debt and we have sizeable cash. We’re consumers,” he stated.