Trustmarque has been sold yet again – this time to Capita for £57m

Capita has acquired Microsoft licensing house and managed services biz Trustmarque for £57m in cash – the fourth time the company has changed hands in three years

Trustmarque, part of the Liberata Group, was rolled onto the market in February by parent Ardbid Ltd, appointing investment bank William Blair to find a buyer, as we exclusively revealed.

The reseller and managed services outfit sells to 1,450 private and public sector clients including Volkswagen Financial Services, the Camping and Caravanning Club and a range of NHS bodies.

The managed services portfolio at Trustmarque includes application support and platforms, IT outsourcing, environment and system management reporting and business critical support.

It employs 620 staff based at offices in York, London, Coventry, Sheffield and Edinburgh, and turned over £191.9m in calendar year ’15, up eight per cent on a pro-forma basis. Profit after tax was £11.94m, versus a loss of £1.64m in the previous year.

Capita confirmed in its London Stock Exchange filing it expects cross-selling, cost savings and market growth will push Trustmarque’s post-tax return on investment to 15 per cent in 2018.

“The mix of core reseller activity and higher value services is a strong proposition that will sit well with our wider technology offering,” said Andy Parker, CEO of Capita, in a canned remark.

Trustmarque was sold by private equity biz LDC to Dunedin for £43m in June 2013 but by September the following year the business ran into potentially terminal liquidity issues after a new auditor discovered a hole in the accounts related to revenue recognition of services contracts.

Management hunted for a new buyer and the backer behind public sector BPO player Liberata came forward, eleven months after it had rescued Trinity Expert Systems.

TES was subsequently merged with Trustmarque at the start of last year, and always looked out of place alongside Liberata, so it was only a matter of time before it was sold on. ®