takeover hoax?

The David Jones takeover approach may have excited investors but the alarm bells are well and truly ringing.

After stunning the market early on Friday with news it had been approached by an mystery bidder, a UK blogger later prompted chairman Bob Savage to name the suitor as EB Private Equity.

However, revealing the party only added to the intrigue surrounding a takeover play, which analysts are privately calling a hoax.

No one in the market has heard of EB Private Equity.

The company’s website (www.ebpe.net) describes it as a “Luxembourg and UK real estate and real estate-related investor, developer and private equity partner” and carries little substantial information except some feel-good quotes from JPMorgan and John D. Rockefeller. Some of the text looks like it has been copied from the website of another UK real estate investor named Moorfield.

The company’s URL is registered to a mailbox address in the UK with a July 27 expiry and lists Yahoo! addresses as contacts. Data collector Dealogic says it has no record of EB Private Equity.

David Jones’ chairman had not heard of EB Private Equity either until he received a letter in the mail outlining a $1.6 billion takeover bid.

Savage and the board urgently need to explain the reasons for Friday’s decision to disclose such a preliminary bid approach, which sent the shares soaring 15 per cent on the last trading day of the financial year.

http://www.afr.com/p/business/companies/djs_takeover_approach_hoax_ZT2m2nGAJzkBjEXGfMgt3L