Chelsea part-owners Clearlake Capital have made a fresh business move that has had a massive impact on the stock market.
Having pumped over £600m into the club for transfers alone since May 2022 as well as the initial £4.25bn commitment, the private equity firm have been far from shy of spending since taking over. With Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano - both founders of the company in 2006 - now working closely with Todd Boehly they are a company to keep an eye on.
The latest move from the USA-based organisation is to make an offer for cloud-computing provider Blackbaud. Clearlake already has an 18.3% stake in the software company and only recently took steps to ensuring that no other shareholder could acquire more than 20%.
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Clearlake are the largest shareholder currently and made an offer to buy the company at $71 (£58) per share, valuing it around $3.78bn (£3.08bn). The all-cash offer has since been rejected by Blackbaud, though Clearlake said in their proposal: "Clearlake would also be willing to support a superior proposal in a transaction that maximizes value for all of the Company’s stockholders."
In the immediate aftermath of the offer Blackbaud's shares had gone up by a massive 20% but have since stabalised to closer to 13%. The offer from Eghbali and Co in the eyes of Blackbaud was described as: "highly opportunistic and significantly undervalues Blackbaud."
Other new business ventures from Boehly and Clearlake in the near future could well be a higher profile takeover in order to form the start of a multi-club model under Chelsea's watch. On this, Boehly has previously said: "We’ve talked about having a multi-club model.
“I would love to continue to build out the footprint. There are different countries where there are advantages to having a club. Red Bull does a good job. Manchester City has a big network of clubs.
“Our goal is to ensure pathways for our young stars to get on to the Chelsea pitch while getting them real game time. To do that is through another club in a really competitive league in Europe."
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