Ires Reit’s incoming boss, Eddie Byrne, won’t have much time to settle in when he officially becomes chief executive designate on April 8th.
The company, which has been the subject of a public campaign from Canadian activist investor Vision Capital to put itself up for sale for almost a year, will have to post within days of Byrne’s arrival a notice of its upcoming annual general meeting, scheduled for May 2nd.
The notice will signal whether Ires has reached a settlement of sorts with Vision, which owns about 5 per cent of the company. The Toronto-based firm has set its sights on board seats that would represent the 40 per cent of investors who cast ballots in favour of its – failed – resolution proposing a sale or break-up of Ires at an extraordinary general meeting (egm) in February.
Byrne, who officially takes over as chief executive a day before the agm, and the company’s new chairman, Hugh Scott-Barrett, know they’ll face another public battle if the board doesn’t accede to Vision’s demands.
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One big backer of Vision at the egm, Ires’s founder, Canadian firm Capreit, may have been slowly backing away in recent months, cutting its stake to 13.1 per cent from 18.7 per cent – even if chief executive Mark Kenney told the Sunday Times over the weekend that it still sees “unrealised value in the Ires portfolio” of 3,734 apartments and houses.
But the last four weeks have seen US property specialist Starwood Capital – a backer of Dublin build-to-rent company Urbeo and one-time investor in Hibernia Reit, before it was sold – build up a 2.25 per cent interest.
This is widely viewed as an opportunistic move. Either Starwood is interested in positioning itself to get hold of some of Ires’s assets or it sees Ires ultimately being sold. (Scott-Barrett has promised to give shareholders an update on Ires’s strategic review before the agm.)
More recently, a new activist investor has arrived on the pitch in the past two weeks, in the form of UK-based Asset Value Investors (AVI). It now owns 3.3 per cent of Ires, according to a stock exchange filing on Wednesday. That’s bound to further concentrate minds on the property group’s board.
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