Electric Business

The private equity firm Metric Capital Partners has bought James Grant Group from Gresham. James Grant is a provider of management and professional services for TV, music and sports clients, including well known names such as Clare Balding, Jake Humphrey and Ronnie O’Sullivan.

Melrose Industries has sold Bridon to Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan for £365m. Established in 1924, Bridon manufactures rope and wire for use in construction, mining, oil and gas detection, telecomms and other specialised markets.

A management buyout has been completed at Wellman Group, which will see the furnace manufacturer renamed as Robey-Wellman Boilers and Furnaces.

The cake and bread bakery goods manufacturer Finsbury Food has acquired Fletchers Group. The £56m deal creates a bakery group with a turnover of around £300m. Fletchers owns the Kara Foodservice brand.

The Dutch firm Abellio has been awarded the contract to run the ScotRail franchise from April 2015. Transport Scotland says that the new franchise is worth up to £6bn and will run for at least five years with Abellio ‘investing millions in providing an improved service and superior facilities for passengers and a better deal for staff’. Abellio will open a Glasgow base with around 200 jobs. FirstGroup has operated the First ScotRail franchise since 2004.

The cloud services operator Interoute Communications has acquired the fibre-optic network operator Vtesse.

Restore, a provider of office services, has bought Cintas Document Management (CDM) for £23.5m. CDM is the UK records management and scanning division of Cintas Corporation. The deal reinforces Restore’s position as the UK’s second largest provider of records management services.

Virgin Atlantic is to close its domestic flights business Little Red in 2015, less than two years after it was launched. Virgin Atlantic says that the European Commission’s decision to allow British Airways to take over British Midland and all of its flight slots made it impossible for a new entrant to the market like Little Red to attract enough business to make it profitable. Little Red’s daily services between London Heathrow and Manchester will continue until the end of March 2015, while its flights between London Heathrow and Edinburgh and Aberdeen will continue until September 2015.

South Coast Catering has been acquired by the Airedale Group, in a deal which creates one of the largest specialist catering service networks in the UK. South Coast, established in 1991, will be combined with Airedale Group’s technical services division.

Hewlett-Packard is to separate into two new entities: Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, a corporate infrastructure software & services business; and HP, a personal computers & printing business. Hewlett-Packard shareholders will own shares of both new companies.