Couple scoop £2bn in Blackrock deal offloading knowledge agency Preqin

The husband and wife behind data group Preqin are about to join the ranks of Britain’s richest people after agreeing to sell to Blackrock for £2.55billion.

Mark and Lindy O’Hare, who own 80 per cent of the business through a family holding, will rake in a £2billion windfall when the deal completes.

This alone would make the couple richer than Blackrock boss Larry Fink, who has a net worth of £1.3billion and founded the money manager in 1988.

The takeover will also make the O’Hares richer than F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone and Hargreaves Lansdown founder Peter Hargreaves, who are both worth around £1.8billion.

Some of Preqin’s 300-strong workforce also own a share of the group and are set to become multi-millionaires as a result of the deal.

Founded in 2003, Preqin tracks the performance of private equity firms and hedge funds. 

The UK group has nearly 50,000 customers and 16 global offices, according to its website.

It is set to post revenues of £190million for 2024. Cambridge-educated O’Hare was chief executive before he stepped down in 2022 while his wife worked at the firm until 2008. 

She is on the company’s board and ‘represents the O’Hare family’s interests in the business’.

The takeover comes as Blackrock looks to expand its technology arm and an increasing number of its clients hunt granular information about the financial markets.

The US titan recently agreed to buy data group Global Infrastructure Partners in January for £10billion.

Blackrock chief operating officer Rob Goldstein said: ‘As clients increasingly evolve their focus from choosing products to constructing portfolios, this shift requires technology, data, and analytics.’

Blackrock said Preqin would complement its portfolio management software Aladdin, which provides investors a way to view and manage daily investments.

Mark O’Hare will join Blackrock as vice chairman after the deal closes.

He started his career at Boston Consulting Group before turning his hand to business in the 1990s. 

He set up Citywatch, a shareholder information service, in 1993 before selling it to Reuters five years later.

Lindy O’Hare is South African and studied English at the University of Natal and Contemporary Art at Goldsmiths College.

Aside from business, the couple made headlines during the pandemic when they built an outdoor theatre in the grounds of their Suffolk farm estate.

The 350-seat theatre, which cost £70,000 to construct, sits inside a Second World War bomb crater.

Thorington Theatre is in its third season of music, theatre, opera, comedy and poetry but has become one of the best-known open-air theatres in Britain.

In an interview with the BBC in 2022, Lindy O’Hare said: ‘Profit was not the driving force – as long as it’s not a drain on the farm, we’re happy.’

The theatre is open from June to August.

Takeover frenzy sees £31bn of UK firms sold

By JOHN-PAUL FORD ROJAS 

 A ‘feeding frenzy’ has seen UK-listed firms worth a total of more than £31billion succumb to takeover offers in the first half of this year.

Figures yesterday from broker Peel Hunt showed there have been 30 ‘firm’ offers for British businesses since the start of January with an average value of just over £1billion.

The total half-year value of £31.5billion was the highest since the second half of 2021.

And it is already more than 50 per cent ahead of the £19billion for the whole of 2023.

Charles Hall, head of research at Peel Hunt, has previously described the rash of takeovers as a ‘feeding frenzy’.

And yesterday, his colleague Michael Nicholson, head of mergers & acquisitions (M&A) at the broker, said: ‘At the start of the year, we observed that the UK takeover market was like a coiled spring – now, the jack is out of the box.’

The figures could fuel anxiety that Britain’s corporations are being sold on the cheap, including to foreign predators, thanks to the low valuations on the UK stock market.

But Nicholson said directors at takeover target companies have been emboldened to demand higher offers amid an improvement for the market.

That meant bidders on average were paying an average 40 per cent-60 per cent premium to the share price to seal deals, up from a previous typical range of 30 per cent-50 per cent.