Indian owner for Briar Chemicals

New Delhi-based Safex Chemicals has acquired UK-based agrochemical CDMO Briar Chemicals from pan-European alternative investment firm Aurelius in a £73 million deal. Safex is itself backed by a private equity firm, ChrysCapital, and supplies crop protection chemicals. This is its first overseas acquisition.

Briar was formed as a carve-out transaction from Bayer CropScience in 2012. It has a 46.5-hectare site at Norwich dating back to 1955, when May & Baker founded it and subsequently went through many changes of ownership. The site operates lab- to large-scale reactors, with available space and infrastructure for future expansion.

Neeraj Jindal, a director of Safex, has joined the Briar board and “will steer the future growth of the company”, Safex said. There are no plans to move location or make any redundancies among the 250 employees.