MIDLOTHIAN Capital Partners has bought the Parks Leisure holiday park firm with a consortium of investors.
The investment business, which despite its name and other Scottish branding operates from London and Connecticut, said the deal values Park Leisure at £103 million.
It has made the investment eight months after acquiring the Dobbies Garden Centres business from Tesco, with Hattington Capital, for £217m.
The deal points to continued strong investor interest in UK holiday businesses, amid predictions the fallout from the Brexit vote will boost the appeal of staycations.
The fall in the value of the pound has made overseas holidays more expensive.
Midlothian Capital’s Andrew Bracey said it had looked at a number of opportunities in the holiday park sector. It reckons there is an exciting opportunity to grow Park Leisure across the UK.
In December a Canadian private equity firm, Onex, bought the Parkdean caravan holiday park business for £1.35bn.
Park Leisure has 10 sites in England and Wales and £58 million turnover.
The investors led by Midlothian Capital have joined with the Park Leisure management team to buy out Gary Molloy, who co-founded the business 19 years ago. Co-founder Miles Dewhurst has become chief executive.
Midlothian Capital is run by three partners who have worked in sectors ranging from retail to investment banking.Mr Bracey was chief financial officer of the Ocado online retail business and has worked for UBS.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here