Gama Aviation, headquartered at Farnborough, UK, is set to acquire Aviation Beauport, a privately owned Jersey-based company offering a range of business aviation services.

The acquisition is conditional upon approval from the Jersey Competition Authority which was expected to complete by the end of February. The acquisition includes a consideration of £3.7 million in cash and the issue of one million ordinary shares which, based on Gama's closing share price on 7 January 2016, gives a total consideration of £7.71m. On completion, the purchase of Beauport will include fixed assets with a book value of approximately £2.9m and net current assets of approximately £940,000.

Aviation Beauport has been operating since 1969 and has established itself as a premier aircraft service provider in the Channel Islands. Services on offer include aircraft charter, handling, parking, hangarage and aircraft management.

Gama CEO Marwan Khalek sees the deal as an important strategic move. “It allows us to extend our product offering in our European air and ground operations,” he says. “It will also provide unique access and opportunity to service the large number of high net worth individuals who reside in Jersey, thereby providing potential customer growth.”

Aviation Beauport's owner Mike Bell adds: “I am delighted to have Beauport become part of the Gama family of companies, which is pre-eminent in the general aviation community. The industry is becoming dominated by fewer, larger players and Gama is at the forefront of that expansion. It seemed logical to work with one of the most respected and progressive players in the industry.”

Group chief marketing officer at Gama Duncan Daines reinforces the attraction of the HNWI density in Jersey, and says that the recently launched Jersey register is also a draw: “There are plenty of oppor-tunities to expand services and infrastructure that we can bring to the existing Aviation Beauport offering, for example an increase in line maintenance and certainly the potential for future base maintenance activities.

'With the register now starting up, there may well be aircraft owners on the island that have their aircraft registered elsewhere and now want to bring them onto the Jersey register and have them based and managed there, as well as line maintained and potentially base maintained. We saw Jersey and the Channel Islands overall as another important link in our network,” Daines concludes.