Asda faces a £100m annual rent bill after its new owners hive off the supermarket’s warehouses.
Asda’s distribution assets will be sold for £1.2bn to institutional property investors before leasing them back to the supermarkets chain. Based on a yield of 7% Asda would have rent of about £100m on its 25 distribution centres.
The structure of the deal will see Asda shackled with at least double the debt of any of its rivals, with TDR and EG putting in just £800m of the £6.8bn price tag.
The billionaire Issa brothers and TDR Capital, who jointly own EG Group, said that they would sell Asda’s petrol forecourt business to their own petrol station empire for £750m.
