Pioneer attracts joint bid from Advent and CVC – report (translated)
Pioneer, the asset management arm of Unicredit, has attracted the interest of a consortium made up private equity firms Advent and CVC, Italian language daily Il Sole 24 Ore reported. The unsourced report said that the two companies had been looking at the dossier over the last few weeks.
Both PE firms know the company well after having made separate bids for Pioneer in 2014. However, the item claimed that industry buyers are in a stronger position to acquire Pioneer if it is sold off. The report said that an IPO for Pioneer is still under consideration.
JPMorgan is acting as the financial advisor to the Pioneer dossier and Gianni Origoni Grippo Cappelli is its legal advisor, the report said.
The report also cited Gian-Maria Gros Pietro, the chairman of Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo, as saying that a merger between its asset management arm Eurizon and Pioneer is not under consideration.
Such a merger would have created a company with EUR 483bn in assets under management, as previously reported.