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Cape Town - The Competition Appeal Court has given Oceana the green light to acquire Foodcorp's fishing business for R400m.
In a statement issued on Friday Oceana said it was pleased at the decision by the Competition Appeal Court to uphold its appeal and in so doing confirmed its entitlement to include the pelagic fishing rights in its proposed acquisition of Foodcorp.
Oceana group CEO Francois Kuttel said that, in the absence of securing the pelagic fishing rights, the company could not have gone ahead with the deal. The pelagic fishing rights were a commercial imperative for the acquisition to proceed.
Imported from canneries
The R400m deal will involve Oceana acquiring Foodcorp’s fishing business, which consists of the business of catching, processing and selling deep-sea trawl hake, south coast lobster and pelagic fish.
Excluded from the acquisition is Foodcorp’s west coast lobster and hake long-line fishing rights.
“Over half of our canned pilchards are currently imported from 12 canneries we have established internationally. We now want to look at replacing some of these imports by using Foodcorp’s pelagic fishing rights,” said Kuttel.
“We argued from the start that we were best placed to secure Foodcorp’s long term future and this has been a very long and arduous process. What is critical is the sense of security and certainty this now brings to the approximately 1 000 employees of Foodcorp. They have been in a state of limbo since the process first started, which must have been very unsettling for them.”
