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Sir Stelios: ICAMAP’s easyHotel bid has been a colossal waste of money
Commenting on ICAMAP’s declaration of its offer for easyHotel to be unconditional as to acceptances, made earlier today, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the company’s founder said:
“While I applaud the ICAMAP/Ivanhoe’s huge vote of confidence in easyHotel – I must repeat my insistence that it remains a listed company on the London market. It’s now clear that easyGroup’s 28% blocking minority stake and ICAMAP’s low ball offer has made it impossible for easyHotel to be taken private. Therefore this exercise was an object lesson in pointlessness. By taking their stake from 38% to 68%, ICAMAP have achieved little other than to enrich lawyers and bankers to the tune of £1.5m. What a colossal waste of money!
“But we are where we are. Consequently I strongly urge ICAMAP’s senior management to engage positively with easyGroup to consider all matters of joint interest to us as the two major shareholders. These include replacement of all the directors, whose advice to shareholders to accept the undervalued offer at 95p was plainly wrong. We will also need to lay out a roadmap for further equity raisings in what is now Europe’s fastest growing super-budget hotel chain to make it the success it surely deserves to be.”