Amdel sale bears fruit

The first significant private equity exit of the year will deliver windfall returns for Champ Ventures, which signed a sale agreement with the French company Bureau Veritas early Friday.

The French laboratory group beat off a host of rival bidders and is believed to have paid more than $400 million for the Australian laboratory analysis company Amdel.

Bureau Veritas, which was advised by ABN Amro, has laboratory analysis operations around the world, but none in the booming mining sector, which is Amdel's forte and the primary driver of its success in recent years.

Amdel was bought for around $60 million from Healthscope in a Champ Ventures-sponsored MBO in late 2005. However, it has invested heavily in new businesses – buying Independent Metallurgical Laboratories and Ultra Trace last year, and environmental laboratory specialist LabMark last month – and expanded its laboratories in Mt Isa and Adelaide.

Amdel was advised by a Caliburn team led by Simon Mordant and a Goldman Sachs JBWere team led by Sean Walsh. It was initially run as a two-tracked process, but it rapidly became clear that an IPO was not a serious option in the current market.