Ila Security, maker of ‘style-conscious’ personal security devices for women, is reversing into AIM shell Baylon Holdings.
Ila Security, maker of ‘style-conscious’ personal security devices for women, is reversing into AIM shell Baylon Holdings.
Set up two years ago by advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Zag subsidiary, investment manager-turned technology entrepreneur Simon McGivern and colleague James Phillips, Ila makes ‘Dust’, a pocket-sized alarm that emits a 120 decibel female scream and can be worn on a key chain or handbag. The company is now developing five new products, provisionally called Jogger, Hook, Wedge, Pebble and Leash.
Under the proposed deal, Baylon, the renamed former car tyre recycling hopeful Molectra Group which disposed of its former operating business Down Under in December, will acquire Ila by issuing an initial 389 million shares to its shareholders. This will be followed by another 375 million shares if Baylon receives a hoped-for £554,444 tax credit from Australia, where Molectra Australia lost £4.8 million in the nine months to last September.
If shareholders agree the takeover, Baylon will rename itself Ila Group, with McGivern 36, as chief executive officer and Phillips, also 36, as sales director. Baylon’s present chief executive officer Paul Gazzard, 38, a former colleague of McGivern at stockbroker Panmure Gordon, will be chief operating officer of Ila Group if the deal goes through.
McGivern argues ‘the acquisition is ideally timed to allow the expansion of Ila’s existing relationships with major UK retailers as well as our international sales programme within the USA, Canada and Europe’. Gazzard says he hopes the deal will ‘allow Ila to fulfil its potential and grow into an international brand’.
