Montpellier ups bid for Bullough to £7.3m

Montpellier Group PLC's Tobull Ltd has today (Tuesday) increased its cash offer for Bullough PLC, a manufacturing engineering group, from 12p per share to 14p a share - putting a value on the company of £7.44m.

Tobull's originally made a conditional cash offer of 12p per share on 24 April, equivalent to £6,3m. Bullough responded by saying that the offer was 'inappropriate at this present time.'

However, the new offer represents a premium of about 115% above the closing middle market price of 6.5p per Bullough share on 16 April, the last trading day before the announcement of an offer.

For the year to December 2002, Bullough posted consolidated turnover of £82.7m and made a pretax loss of £7.4m.

If successful, Bullough will become part of Tobull, a wholly owned subsidiary of Montpellier that was set up specifically to make the purchase.