NEW Friends Provident boss Trevor Matthews is expected to review the proposed sale of assets as reluctant buyers threaten to undermine the firm's latest strategy.
The firm has not attracted high enough bids for Pantheon, the financial advisory business it bought last summer.
It was one of three disposals planned as part of a turnaround programme announced in January following the failed £8.4bn merger wit
h Resolution.
Analysts believe its wealth management firm Lombard is most likely to find a buyer, but uncertainty remains over the firm's 53% stake in F&C Asset Management.
The failure to find buyers has put a question over the company's plans to return £800m to investors through a share buyback.
Friends pulled the sale of Pantheon as it could not agree on a price with the IFA's management and its backers, the private equity house AnaCap.
Friends valued Pantheon at £30m, but the highest offer is understood to have been £25m.
Lombard is being monitored by three possible buyers, Swiss Life and private equity groups CVC and Hellman & Friedman. But the trio are thought to be unwilling to meet Friends' asking price, believed to be in the region of £500m.
F&C, which is in the middle of its own turnaround plan to halt declining earnings and stem the loss of funds, has attracted little interest from buyers. The fund manager's second-largest shareholder Dawnay Day sold its stake earlier this month at just above all-time lows.
Matthews, the former head of Standard Life retail, who joined Friends last week as chief executive, will be given time to take the group forward. Analysts believe he will struggle to complete the sell-off plan.
One said: "When he accepted the job he bought into the strategy, and that points to continuing with the sale. But in this market it is hard to see how buyers will be found who are willing to meet Friends' expectations on price."
Friends' investors hope Matthews will find ways to revive the beleaguered group's fortunes, breathing life into a stock whose price has halved this year and which has the cheapest valuation in the sector at around 0.6% of embedded value, compared with a sector average of around 0.9%.
The planned merger with Resolution collapsed when a bidding war broke out between Standard Life and Pearl for the zombie funds group. The failure to tie-up with Resolution cost chief executive Philip Moore his job.
In June, ABN Amro analyst Youssef Ziai argued for a merger of Standard Life and Friends, saying they were complementary businesses.
The full article contains 438 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
