M&A Sleuth in Sintra . . .

Greetings from sunny Portugal.   I am enjoying some vacation time here after attending and presenting at the European Academy of Management conference in Lisbon this past week.   I will have more to say about that conference in a later post.   But for today, I offer some light thoughts and an Internet "treasure hunt" relating to mergers and acquisitions.

I arrived at my hotel in Sintra earlier today to find a notice in the room stating that "[o]n the 30th June 2019, the Hotel Tivoli Sintra will be changing the legal business entity which will be reflected in future invoices."  The notice went on to ask that, "to avoid possible delays relating to the billing" each guest pay up his or her bill to date on June 30th "in a partial invoice," noting that "[t]he remaining services will be invoiced at the departure time with the new entity."  Apologies were made for "the inconvenience" and thanks were offered for "the understanding."

Of course, as an M&A practitioner and instructor, I wanted to know what led to this change in "legal business entity."  I suspected a merger or acquisition transaction.  Was it an asset transaction in which the hotel brand was being changed?  That's what I suspected.  Since I ask my advanced business law students to try to identify the nature of business combination transactions from news reports and public filings, I thought I would see what I could find out by doing a bot of Internet research.  Here's what I learned.

Minor Hotels "completed the acquisition of the entire Tivoli portfolio in early 2016."  I read this in the Minor International Public Company Limited 2016 Annual Report.  See also here.  The Tivoli Hotel Sintra was part of this final stage in acquiring the Tivoli hotels.  See here.  Minor International (known as MINT) is registered under the laws of the Kingdom of Thailand.

In the fall of 2018, MINT launched a compulsory tender offer for shares of NH Hotel Group SA.  The tender offer was commenced as a result of MINT's acquisition of a >30% equity stake in NH Hotel Group in a series of transactions earlier in the year.  A news report reveals that MINT's significant stock acquisitions were part of an initial unsolicited bid for NH Hotel Group, which Hyatt Hotels & Resorts also desired to acquire.  (Spain has a compulsory tender offer law that kicks in when control of a public company--which includes the direct or indirect acquisition of 30% or more of the public company's voting rights--changes.  See here.)  By the end of October, MINT had acquired sufficient additional shares of NH Hotel Group's common stock to bring its equity stake in NH Hotel Group to over 94%.  See here and here and here.  A subsequent news report indicates that "NH Hotels and Minor Hotels are seeking to further integrate their brands."  The same posting noted that "[p]lans are already underway in Brazil and Portugal to rebrand some Minor Hotels as NH Hotels, with 15 hotels in the two countries undergoing the transformation."

Accordingly, it seems that I may be among the last hotel guests to stay at the Tivoli Hotel Sintra as a Tivoli branded hotel.  At least that's my guess based on what I have read.  Although I was not correct in my original guess as to the nature of the transaction that led to the change in "legal business entity" of my Sintra hotel, if my assessment is correct, I wasn't far off.  An asset acquisition was involved at the outset, but the posited rebranding happened later and was more the result of a series of stock acquisitions in a hostile, competitive takeover environment.  Not a bad day's work in M&A sleuthing.  Just call me Nancy Drew, right, Ann?