Fair Pint to invest in Enterprise Inns and Punch Taverns

Fair Pint campaigners are set to buy what they describe as 'activist stakes' in the country's leading listed pub companies.

Members of the group, which is arguing for the abolition of the beer tie, believe the move will help them press for changes to the leased and tenanted business model.

In a statement Fair Pint said it believed there was no long term value in the shares of either Punch Taverns or Enterprise Inns.

However it felt "that holding shares in the companies will allow them to act in the interest of both tenants and other shareholders by using 'shop floor' knowledge form their members in the tenanted estate to question executives".

Fair Pint's Brian Jacobs said the group was in talks with founding members in order to secure further funds to take this stage of the campaign forward.

One of Fair Pint's biggest backers is music promoter Vince Power, who leases a number of pubs from Enterprise Inns.

"The group decided to press ahead after seeing last week's trading statement from Enterprise Inns which we believe leaves a number of unanswered questions about trading performance and property valuations," added Jacobs.

"We believe there are grounds to believe that pubco estates have suffered significant falls in value. We are concerned that Enterprise and other pubcos are not being open about the true value of their estates."

Jacobs said Fair Pint was taking legal advice regarding how best to use shareholder and bondholder status.

"We certainly hope to contact other stakeholders and brokers with real trading and valuation information. There's no market at all now for disposing of large groups of tied pubs and we hope to see a natural movement towards the sale of pub freeholds, at real prices, to the real operators - the publicans themselves," he said.

In a statement Punch Taverns said: "It's a free market and anyone can buy shares in any publicly quoted company... glad to see that they think pub companies are a good investment."

While still nowhere near the highs they witnessed some 18 months ago, shares in both Enterprise Inns and Punch Taverns have staged recoveries in recent weeks.

Enterprise shares have risen from 68p at the end of March to more than 104p today, while Punch Taverns stock is up from 58.5p at the end of last month to today's price of 90.5p.