Tag: UK

The private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners is pressing the Government to be allowed to buy a stake in Royal Mail should it decide to part- privatise the state-owned postal operator.

CVC, which owns a number of household names in the UK including the AA and the Debenhams department store, is understood to have approached ministers and the Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton to set out its ideas.

CVC recently completed a EUR6bn (pounds 4bn) fund-raising in Europe to finance acquisitions. Any auction of Royal Mail would be certain to attract interest from rival private-equity firms and other trade bidders.

The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Alan Johnson, is due to receive a report from Sir George Bain on the future of Royal Mail before the end of the year, which could pave the way for a partial privatisation of the organisation.

UK Royal Mail is protesting vociferously to the public and government about the damage that will be wreaked by proposed price controls, while agreeing with many elements of those controls in private, its regulator has suggested.

“They have gone over the top in terms of public comment . . . and some of it is quite deliberate. A lot of the private discussion is much more reasonable – there is much more agreement,” Sarah Chambers, chief executive of Postcomm, says in a Financial Times interview. “We’re not very far apart at all but you wouldn’t hear them say that publicly.”

The assertion is typical of the steely determination evinced by the 46-year-old regulatory chief in the face of intense lobbying by Royal Mail. The regulator and company are at loggerheads over proposals for price controls for 2006-10 that Postcomm issued in June. The “rather highly-charged atmosphere” – as Ms Chambers puts it – reflects the amount at stake for Royal Mail.