Rakesh Bhasin has handed in his notice at freshly delisted UK B2B fibreco Colt, with Carl Grivner taking over in January.
Having completed his nine-year tenure at Colt, Bhasin will return to asset manager Fidelity, which over the summer launched a tender offer for the 33.4% of the company it did not already own. He will continue to act as an advisor to Colt, the company said.
Grivner, who joined Colt in May as executive vice president of network services, has previously held the top jobs at data centre and undersea cable operator Pacnet until its acquisition by Australia’s Telstra, and at US network provider XO Communications.
Praising Grivner’s “unique set of [global] network and data centre assets,” Colt chairman Simon Haslam described the company as “well positioned for long-term success.”
Still a target?
Industry observers have for some time been eyeing Colt as a takeover target, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact it has significantly underperformed its peers in the booming trans-Atlantic B2B fibre sector. Fidelity’s 190p tender offer valued the company at £1.7bn, with a 7x 2015 EV/EBITDA multiple, compared with the high teens achieved by recent M&A deals.
One industry executive has suggested that Fidelity would now prime Colt for a sale to US heavyweight Level 3.
JP Morgan advised Fidelity on the take private, while Barclays advised Colt’s directors, who had opposed the move. They said that despite the 34.4% premium, it had not taken into account a turnaround strategy that involved mothballing the IT services division to focus on the network, voice and data centre business.
In August, the company announced that non-executive directors Olivier Baujard, Sergio Giacoletto, Katherine Innes Ker, Anthony Rabin and Lorraine Trainer had stepped down.