Internos Real Investments is set to expand its burgeoning fund management business into the UK and the Far East with a takeover of the Invista Group.
The investment manager this week announced that it has reached an agreement on the terms of a recommended offer to buy all of Invista Real Investment Management’s outstanding shares for £33.6m.
The deal would add two funds to the business, run by Jos Short and Andrew Thornton, which has €2.1bn of assets under management in nine continental European countries. As at 31 December 2011 Invista had £749m AUM.
If the recommended deal completes, Internos would take control of the Invista Real Estate International Fund, which focuses on Asia.
Its single investment is a 50% stake in BOSS, which owns five self-storage assets across Hong Kong and Singapore.
The sec-ond fund is the Invista Real Estate Opportunity Fund, which has a seven-strong portfolio comprising six UK properties and one in Switzerland.
Invista co-invests and manages both funds, which have five-year lives that expire in February and May 2013, respectively.
Both may be extended at the discretion of the investment manager for up to two further one-year periods.
Internos has already picked up two funds previously managed by Invista, which began a wind-down process in October 2010 after 55% shareholder Lloyds transferred mandates for around £2bn of assets to rival Scottish Widows.
Last summer it won the bid to take over the £144.7m listed Invista European Real Estate Trust with a mandate to sell its assets over the next three years.
In January this year Icelandic bank Kaupthing appointed the firm investment manager of the €90m Celsius European Holdings, which has 11 French office and industrial buildings. Internos then recruited Invista’s entire Paris team.
The takeover is being funded by loans of £15m from Invista, £300,000 from Internos and £16m from BAC, a third-party limited partner in Invista’s funds, plus £3m equity from Internos’s parent IRL and Internos partner Richard Peskin.
The deal is expected to be finalised by mid-July.
