Lookers plc, the owners of Belfast based Charles Hurst Group were recently taken over by a Canadian company Global Auto Holdings. The name Global Auto Holdings is a bidding vehicle for Toronto based Alpha Auto Group.
The deal is worth 130p per Lookers share after a previous bid for 120p was initially rejected by shareholders. The new deal valued Lookers plc at £504.2million. Charles Hurst, which is led by operations director Jeff McCartney, is NI’s largest car dealer group. It runs Europe’s biggest automotive retail operation on a 30-acre site in Boucher Road. The business was acquired by Lookers plc in 1996 and has a portfolio of 25 manufacturers including Ferrari, Bentley and Aston Martin as well Jaguar Land Rover and Toyota. The company recently announced new Lotus, Cupra and ORA dealerships as well.
Charles Hurst has eight sites in Northern Ireland, and two in the Republic. It employs close to 900 staff but in mid December it announced that it would be making 100 redundancies across its sites here as well as further redundancies across other Lookers sites.
