Millionaire wants bigger bite of Oyster

Millionaire Marlborough businessman, vineyard owner, mussel farming pioneer, real estate developer and second-hand car dealer Peter Yealands is trying to buy a controlling interest in Oyster Bay Marlborough Vineyards.

Yealands has offered $3.10 cash for each Oyster Bay ordinary share in an attempt to acquire four million shares and a controlling 51.1 per cent stake in the company.

The offer, described by one fund manager as a "fairly priced bid", values the company at $27.9 million.

Last year, Yealands personally wrote to about 800 small investors offering $2.80 a share in a bid to acquire 5 per cent of the company.

Since then, Yealands has increased his stake to 6.7 per cent.

Oyster Bay told the New Zealand Stock Exchange it would set up an independent committee of directors to consider the offer, appoint an independent adviser and send shareholders a target company statement.

"The directors recommend that shareholders do not trade their shares in the company until they have received a copy of the target company statement," it said.

Oyster Bay was formed in 1999 by one of New Zealand's largest winemakers, Delegat's Wine Estate.

Delegat's, one of about 900 shareholders, owns 32.58 per cent of the company, which has 535ha in three vineyard properties in the central Wairau Valley.

Delegat's is contracted to purchase all grapes produced by Oyster Bay for at least 20 years.

Yealands came from a prominent Blenheim family and left school at 14 to help his sick father run the family grocery store.

Yealands, who began as a marine farming pioneer in the late 1960s, grows grapes, develops lifestyle properties in the Marlborough Sounds and imports cars.

Oyster Bay's operating revenue for the year to June 2004 was $6.5 million, up 169 per cent on the previous year's $2.4 million. Operating surplus after tax was $1.2 million compared with a deficit of $379,724 the year before.

The company posted an unaudited after-tax operating deficit of $132,000 for the six months to December 31, compared with a deficit of $448,000 the year before. The company's operating revenues are generated during the second half of the financial year after the grape harvest.

Oyster Bay shares closed up 30c yesterday at $3.10.