Belgian department store chain Inno has a new owner again. The company will fall into Scandinavian hands and will be owned by Axcent of Scandinavia AB and SKEL. The amount of money involved in the transaction, which is still to be settled in July 2024, is not known.
Inno SA and Innovative Retail BV are the two BVs that have been acquired. Since the department store chain will have two new owners, who will get the same number of shares, we will zoom in on both in this article, starting with Axcent of Scandinavia.
Axcent of Scandinavia
Axcent of Scandinavia is a Swedish retail group. The group is headed by Ayad Al-Saffar. Al-Saffar has decades of experience in retail. For example, in 2000 he took over the jewelry brand Ur & Penn. To this day, this brand is owned by the Lebanese-Swedish entrepreneur. Not much later he took over the jewelry chain Lucardi, but in 2018 he sold the majority stake in the chain to Mentha Capital. Most recently, he was involved in the takeover of the Swedish department store chain Åhléns. In 2022, he will take a majority stake in the department store chain through Axcent of Scandinavia. The partner in the takeover is the investment company Härstedt & Jansson Invest AB, which will acquire a minority stake. Ayad Al-Saffar therefore also became CEO of Åhléns.
In the press release for the Inno acquisition, Al-Saffar is praised for his experience in transforming and expanding retail chains. “With each acquisition, he turned red figures into black figures in record time.”
DIFFERENCE
The second new owner of Inno is investment company SKEL. Behind SKEL are Ásgeir Helgi Reykfjörð Gylfason (CEO) and Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson (chairman). The latter played a major role together with his investment partners in the restructuring of Scandinavian department stores Magasin du Nord and Illum, as can be read in the press release from Inno.
Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson is somewhat controversial, according to FashionUnited’s own research. Among other things, he was the boss of the Icelandic retail group Baugur, which collapsed at the end of the 00s. At the end of the 00s, the entrepreneur repeatedly made negative headlines. For example, an investigation was launched into him after several Icelandic banks with which he did business collapsed. He was later found guilty of tax evasion between 1998 and 2003. A fraud lawsuit was also filed against him in the United States.
Above SKEL hangs the company Strengur, also mentioned in the press release of Inno. Sigurður Bollason is at the helm. Bollason has also been in the news several times in a negative way. For example, the Panama Papers in 2016 showed that his children – who were four and six at the time the Panama Papers were released – were the owners of a shell company in Panama. This company did take out several loans of several millions.
The men behind SKEL are not without controversy. It is good to mention that no new cases have come to light in recent years.
Source: fashionunited.nl
