The owner of The Very Group, one of Britain’s biggest online shopping platforms, is to launch a £2bn auction of the company just months after taking control.
Sky News has learnt that Carlyle, the American private equity giant, is lining up Barclays and JP Morgan to handle a sale of Very, which sells a wide range of fashion, toys and electrical goods.
An auction is expected to kick off shortly and will come after a series of earlier sale plans drawn up under the ownership of the financially troubled Barclay family were put on hold.
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The proposal to launch an “immediate” sale process was disclosed in a filing at Companies House by administrators to VGL Holdco, a corporate entity which now has no connection to Very’s operations.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was appointed to oversee the insolvency of VGL Holdco in November, enabling Carlyle – a long-standing creditor – to take control for the token sum of £1.
Very, which boasts annual revenue of more than £2bn and is chaired by Nadhim Zahawi, the former Conservative chancellor, is expected to report strong sales next week for the Christmas and Black Friday period.
The change of control last autumn brought to an end more than 20 years of Barclay family involvement with the business, which was known as Littlewoods when it last changed hands in 2002 in a £750m deal.
Nasdaq-listed Carlyle had injected several hundred million pounds into Very Group’s capital structure, initially to support it through the Covid pandemic in 2021.
This support, which included a further £85m from Carlyle in 2024, paved the way for it to take ownership control under the terms of the financing.
In documents filed at Companies House this week, PwC said an M&A process would be “run on a basis and timescale consistent with what would be expected for a business the size of the operating group”.
One insider said Carlyle’s ownership had always been intended to be on a…
