A pizza...and £1,000 of Deliveroo shares, please

ACTIVIST investor DBay Advisors has raised its stake in Telit Communications, and now owns 26 per cent of the AIM-listed ‘internet of things’ provider.

Quite what that will mean for Telit – which hit the headlines in 2017 when its chief executive Oozi Cats had to resign after it emerged he was linked to fraud in the US – remains to be seen.

Late last year, Telit received three takeover bids, including one from DBay.

The other offers came from one of Telit’s rivals, US-listed Lantronix, and Swiss semiconductor firm U-blox.

However, the Telit board failed to agree a deal with any of the potential buyers.

Now that DBay holds a sizeable chunk of the company, it looks well positioned to have another tilt.

AN APPETISING offer has arrived from Deliveroo. It’s not a halfpriced Biryani, but a plan to offer £50 million of shares to customers.

They can register their interest in up to £1,000 of stock via the takeaway firm’s app tomorrow, when it is expected to formally unveil its £7.5 billion London float. If the offer is oversubscribed, the most loyal customers will be prioritised.

The offering is heartening as armchair investors

IF DELIVEROO isn’t to your taste, check out home cooking specialist Premier Foods. Tomorrow it will launch a £1million marketing blitz for its Sharwood’s curry sauce brand – its first in five years.

Shares in the maker of Oxo and Bisto have made big gains over the past year as consumers munch their way through lockdown at home. They sit at 93p, up from early pandemic lows of 19p, but will doughty Premier’s brands be shunned when restaurants reopen? have been locked out of several big floats of late, angering the major investment platforms.

Deliveroo also aims to give £16 million of payments to the riders who have delivered the most orders, with an average windfall of £440, via a ‘Thank You Fund’.

Given the questions it has faced over riders’ rights, we’ll reserve judgment on how generous this gratitude is until it’s clear how much management will make from this whopper of a flotation.

SAVVY hedge fund Bybrook Capital has quietly been building up a sizeable stake in Amigo Holdings, the guarantor lender that has had a shocker since floating in 2018 at £2.75 a share.

Bybrook, a debt-focused fund, recently said it owned 6.5 per cent of Amigo while US heavyweight JP Morgan bought a similar amount of stock.

The shares, though, endured a tough ride last week, sliding to just 13p as Amigo was outed as the most complained-about lender in the UK. There are fears that compensation claims could push the firm towards insolvency.

It looks like Amigo badly needs a friend.

Contributor: Ben Harrington

THE owner of one of the most popular Australian wine brands sold in the UK could be about to fall into the hands of a French predator.

Speculation is mounting that Treasury Wine Estates, distributor of the Penfolds label, has been approached about a buyout that could value it at more than £5billion. City sources say Pernod Ricard, France’s largest drinks maker, may be interested in some or all of Treasury Wine Estates, formerly owned by brewer Foster’s.

Pernod Ricard, valued at €41 billion (£35 billion), owns many wine and spirit brands, including Jameson Irish whiskey and Absolut vodka.

Australia has seen a surge in sales to the UK as China imposed crippling tariffs on its wine. City sources said Treasury Wine Estates had received a A$15.67-a-share offer but it is unclear if it was from Pernod Ricard or a US private equity firm.

One source had heard that Treasury Wine Estates may have already rebuffed Pernod Ricard, which could to take a 30 per cent stake instead.

Pernod Ricard and Treasury Wine Estates declined to comment.

BE nice to Rishi,’ said the nurse who kindly carried out a Covid test on me last Friday at work – it proved negative for anyone who is interested in my welfare. How, in between having a swab thrust up my nose, we had ended up talking about the Chancellor and his Budget last Wednesday, I do not know – I didn’t provoke the conversation nor declare what job I do for a living.

But her gentle support of Rishi Sunak seems indicative of many who believe the Chancellor made the best of a bad job in spelling out how households and businesses would start paying for the Government’s

largesse over the past year. As Sarah Bridge’s report on the reaction of small businesses indicates, ‘fair’ seems to be the prevailing verdict on Sunak’s Budget – and it’s a view I don’t disagree with given the precarious economic backdrop against which it was presented.

Of course, there was plenty not to like in the Budget. A five-year freezing of the thresholds at which basic

and higher rate tax kick in will hurt many households – resulting in 1.3million more people being dragged into paying tax by 2026 and another one million becoming higher rate taxpayers.

And, as I report in our brilliant Wealth section, some investors will baulk at Sunak’s decision to freeze (again, for five years) a series of key allowances that will make longterm wealth creation a little trickier (and for some more taxing). As for businesses, many (large rather than small) will face a sharp hike in corporation tax from 2023.

Yet, it would be foolish to think that we (business and households) could start to escape the dreadful clutches of coronavirus and lockdown without making a contribution to all the support the Government has provided the economy over the past year.

Support that has averted catastrophic job losses and a cataclysmic recession.

There could be more tax rises around the corner – as a number of leading economic think-tanks are predicting. But, hopefully, a strong economic bounce in the months ahead will militate against this. I do hope so.

For the time being, I’m prepared to be nice to Rishi.

NS&I has made a pig’s ear of running the Government’s savings bank over the past year. When lockdown hit last March, it hooked savers in by the millions with attractive interest rates at a time when banks were cutting theirs, only to suddenly slash rates to the bone late last year when it couldn’t cope with demand.

The move backfired spectacularly as its already overworked customer support staff struggled to cope with a stampede for the exit doors.

The result of all this is that NS&I’s brand has been damaged badly – some say irreparably – while it has failed to raise the £35billion of funds asked of it by the Government in the current tax year. How NS&I boss Ian Ackerley has kept his job remains a modernday mystery. Against this rather troubling backdrop, I trust NS&I will get itself sorted out before it handles the summer launch of the Government’s green savings bond. A savings product that is designed to appeal to green savers, with the proceeds used to finance green infrastructure projects such as offshore wind farms.

So far, details of the bond are scant – as are assurances from Mr Ackerley that NS&I will be able to cope with the new launch.

‘Be nice to Ian?’ No, it’s lastchance saloon, methinks, for the NS&I boss.