Wittington Investments Limited, the holding of Canada’s Weston Family, signed a definitive agreement for acquiring Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), a drugstore chain that delisted from Nasdaq in August 2025, from Sycamore Partners, Stefano Pessina and his family (see here a previous post by BeBeez). The deal is worth 8.9 billion US Dollars, debt included. The buyer will retain the operational control while its Toronto-listed co-investor Fairfax Financial Holdings will hold 50% of the equity. The transaction must receive the usual approvals and may complete in 1Q27 (press release of Wittington Investments and Fairfax Financial).
Boots sold its retail operations in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Boots Opticians, the No7 Beauty Company, its Thailand’s unit and its international franchising business. Sycamore Partners and the Pessina family will keep Farmacias Benavides in Mexico and Alliance Healthcare Deutschland in Germany.
Fairfax signed an equity commitment letter and made available 2.3 billion US Dollars to finance the purchase price. Wittington’s chairman Galen Weston will head Boots.
Wittington retained CIBC Capital Markets and Morgan Stanley Canada as lead financial advisor, RBC Capital Markets, and Barclays. CIBC and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding also acted as lead arrangers for the deal financing. Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom and A&O Shearman provided the buyer with legal assistance. UBS Investment Bank and Rothschild & Co, JP Morgan, Citi, Deutsche Bank Securities, and Goldman Sachs advised The Boots Group which hired Davis Polk & Wardwell for counsel.
In August 2025, Sycamore delisted Walgreens Boots Alliance on the groune of a 23.7 billion US Dollars enterprise value and a 10 billion equity value (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Stefano Pessina and his family reinvested in the deal the value of the shareholdings that previously held in WBA, as well as providing additional capital.
After such deal, Walgreens, The Boots Group, Shields Health Solutions, CareCentrix, and VillageMD became independent companies. The Boots Group was the owner of Boots UK & Ireland, Boots Opticians, No7 Beauty Company, Boots Thailand, international retail operations under franchise agreements, Farmacias Benavides in Messico, Alliance Healthcare Germany, and Chinese retailers. Ornella Barra acted as the head of WBA.
0n 26 January, Monday, Barra resigned as ceo for becoming chairperson of The Boots Group and replacing Stefano Pessina who kept a board member role (press release). In Septemner 2026, Boots appointed Alex Baldock, the former ceo of Currys and of Very Group (fka Shop Direct), for heading the company (LinkedIn). The manager will retain his role also after this sale.
Wittington Investments owns Loblaw Companies and Choice Properties through George Weston Limited. Loblaw also has Shoppers Drug Mart. In 2003, Wittington purchased UK iconic retailer Selfridges and sold it to Austrian Signa and Thailand’s Central Group in 2021.
Prem Watsa is the chairman and ceo of Fairfax Financial Holdings, a diversified group that has Sleep Country, the owner of UK Simba Sleep and of The Sporting Life Group.
Wittington said it aims to refurbish the shops, optimise the online experience and expand the healthcare range, drawing on the experience gained by the Weston family in Canada with Loblaw and Shoppers Drug Mart. Boots has more than1.800 shops and 50000 workers in the UK and Ireland.
Weston said: “Boots is one of the UK’s longest-established companies, with an extraordinary heritage, a trusted brand and a vital role in everyday life in the UK and Ireland. Wittington sees an opportunity to further develop the company through stable, long-term ownership, new capital investment and a renewed operational focus”.
Watsa remarked the Westons’ experience in developing major pharmacy and beauty retail brands and identified Wittington as a long-term industrial partner.
Stefan Kaluzny is the managing director and co-founder of Sycamore, a firm born in 2011 that invests in in the consumer, distribution and retail sectors and has assets under management of 14 billion US Dollars.
In 2006, Alliance UniChem, a company that Stefano Pessina helped to build through M&A in the European pharmaceutical wholesale sector, merged with Boots to form Alliance Boots. In 2007, KKR and Pessina then launched a management buy-out of the British group, beating Terra Firma in the largest leveraged buy-out ever carried out in Europe worth 11.1 billion GBPs, that required 9 billion in debt and.
Walgreens later acquired Alliance Boots in two stages, completing the transaction at the end of 2014 and creating Nasdaq-listed Walgreens Boots Alliance. Pessina became its CEO and later its executive chairman, whilst KKR fully exited in 2016 (Bloomberg).
WBA’s market capitalisation peaked at over 100 billion US dollars in 2015, but since then the share price fell steadily, bringing the market cap down to less than 8 billion US dollars by the end of 2024 due to competition from its main rival CVS, food chains, major retailers and Amazon. In 2019, when the group already lost almost a third of its value since its 2015 stock market peak, Pessina resumed negotiations with KKR for a takeover bid involving the delisting on the ground of an equity value of 70 billion, but the deal did not go ahead (Bloomberg).
In 1849, John Boot founded Nottingham-based Boots.
The sale to Wittington and Fairfax also puts an end, at least for now, to speculation about Boots returning to the London Stock Exchange – a possibility that resurfaced following the spin-off from WBA and the strengthening of governance in 2026. The new structure geared towards stable private capital and long-term industrial control.
