Leading SABMiller investor supports sweetened £79bn offer by AB InBev

ONE of SABMiller’s 10 largest investors has swung behind the deal after suitor Anheuser-Busch InBev sweetened its offer to £79bn.

The shareholder, who had previously been unhappy with the terms of its takeover, told The Daily Telegraph that the £1-a-share improvement in AB InBev’s all-cash offer to £45-a-share represented “a fair and reasonable premium” and added: “It’s an absolute no-brainer that [SAB] should be recommending it.”

The SAB board, led by chairman Jan du Plessis, is consulting shareholders after Stella Artois-owner AB InBev hiked its bid for the company on Tuesday to quell a growing revolt among the FTSE 100 brewer’s investors.

It followed some shareholders, including activist hedge funds Elliott Capital Advisors and The Children’s Investment Fund, had been pushing Mr du Plessis to seek a better offer after sterling’s plunge in the wake of the Brexit vote meant the deal potentially undervalued SAB.

AB InBev has declared its sweetened offer “final”, meaning it cannot raise its bid again and leaving the biggest takeo- ver in British corporate history poised on a knife-edge.

Aberdeen Asset Management, which sits just outside SAB’s top 20 investors, has already branded the new offer “unacceptable”. SAB’s board is now gauging the views of the rest of the brewer’s investors before deciding whether to recommend the offer.

Aberdeen has rejected the bid because the complex nature of AB InBev’s two-part offer means that even under the sweetened terms SAB’s two biggest investors – tobacco company Altria and Colombia’s Santo Domingo family – will potentially still get a better deal.