Back in August 2014 we discussed some of the details of a potential supermarket merger of Safeway and Albertsons. The deal was approved by shareholders last year, and more recently the merger was cleared by the Federal Trade Commission.
The FTC had antitrust concerns regarding 168 stores owned separately by Safeway and Albertsons, and according to an antitrust agreement, those stores, located mostly in Southern California, Texas and other parts of the West, will be purchased by buyers approved by the FTC.
It is estimated that the new company, which doesn’t yet have a name, will have a combined annual revenue of about $60 billion. The deal, which is valued at $9.2 billion, may be of interest to California businesspeople with a variety of transactional concerns, including shareholder agreements, business valuation, executive employment contracts, real estate sales and yearly governance.
In late 2014 a developer based in Southern California paid $830,000 million for Safeway’s assets in real estate and shopping center development, and it is expected that Safeway will sell or shutter a number of its under-performing stores. To avoid liabilities and pitfalls, any such sale requires careful legal planning on both sides of the transaction.
It was also announced that a number of executives for Safeway, including the CEO and the company’s general counsel, will stay on with the new company in a similar capacity as before. In one of our recent posts, we discussed executive employment contracts and how to make them stand up to scrutiny.
For more on business transactions in general, please explore our business law website.