Simon Laffin has seen a fair few takeover approaches in his time. The chairman of short-haul regional airline Flybe discusses the spectrum of takeovers in his blog “Notes from a non-executive director”.
According to Laffin, who was finance chief at Safeway before it was swallowed by Morrisons in 2004, they range from the knockout, to the “interesting but not enough”, to the spurious and the insulting.
Stobart Group’s takeover approach for Flybe in February evidently fell somewhere between the insulting and the spurious. Stobart bosses walked away empty-handed last month with Laffin’s words ringing in their ears: “If you don’t think the offer is really genuine, don’t feel that you have to engage.”
Was Laffin right to reject the approach? It’s hard to know when