RBS to sell Priory Group to PE firm Advent International for $1.5 billion
18 Jan 2011
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) today aanounced its decision to sell its majority stake in care homes operator Priory Group Ltd to private equity firm Advent International for £925 million ($1.5 billion).
The Priory Group was created in 1980 with the purchase of the Priory Hospital, Roehampton by an American healthcare company. Over the following decades the group acquired more hospitals and diversified its services into acute psychiatry, addictions, secure mental health care, specialist complex care and rehabiltation.
In 1993 the Priory Group moved into specialist education services with the purchase of Jacques Hall Foundation, then an adolescent therapeutic community, in Essex.
Today the group that is best known for providing rehabilitation facilities to celebrities such as Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, operates over 50 hospitals, schools and care homes throughout the UK.
Edinburgh-based RBS, which is majority owned by the UK government following the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, inherited Priory when it acquired Netherlands-based bank ABN Amro in 2007.
ABN Amro had acquired Priory in 2005 for £875 million.
