One of Scotland’s wealthiest businessmen, Alasdair Locke, is boosting his fortune through the £142.5million sale of financial services company Argenta.
Mr Locke, who runs a sheep farm at Duffton in Moray, owns 45% of London-based Argenta and its diversified portfolio of businesses focused on specialist insurance market Lloyd’s of London.
They are being sold to Germany’s Hannover Re, one of the biggest reinsurance companies in the world.
Mr Locke, 63, founded energy services firm Abbot Group, now operating as KCA Deutag, 25 years ago.
He collected nearly £120million from a near £1billion deal announced in December 2007 to take it private through a takeover, worth nearly £1billion, by US private equity firm First Reserve Corporation.
Other business interests helped lift his estimated fortune to around £180million, according to last year’s Sunday Times Rich List of the UK’s wealthiest people.
The sale of Argenta is expected to close in the third quarter of 2017, subject to various approvals.
“We are delighted to have reached agreement to become part of such a strong and well-respected reinsurance group,” Mr Locke said yesterday.
He added: “We believe that this transaction is in the best interests of Argenta, its customers and its staff.”
Mr Locke started his career in 1974, first as a banker with Citibank, Oceanic Finance Corporation and Henry Ansbacher and Company.
As deputy chairman and chief executive of tiny oil and gas explorer Kelt Energy in the late 1980s, he was instrumental in a £200million-plus takeover of rival Carless.
He established Aberdeen-based Abbot Group in 1990 to create a UK-based offshore drilling company and invest in the shipping and offshore industries.
Abbot acquired German business KCA Deutag in Oct 1992 and took it private, refloating the enlarged company in 1995.
Mr Locke, a former E&Y Scottish Entrepreneur of the Year and Grampian Industrialist of the Year, received an honorary doctorate from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen in 2010.
He is currently chairman of Aberdeen-based Hardy Oil and Gas, while just two years ago he was at the heart of a £500million private equity-backed management buyout of the Hertfordshire-based Motor Fuels Group.
Just as with Abbot, he invested in Argenta on a long-term view and then actively managed the business.
He had a small stake from autumn 2003 and later took full control and became chairman in a rescue of the company in the wake of Lloyds taking a battering from Hurricane Rita.
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