Agos­ti­ni’s planned takeover of Pres­tige Hold­ing is still on hold, due to the ab­sence of the Fair Trade Com­mis­sion board.

In a re­lease is­sued yes­ter­day, the com­pa­ny in­di­cat­ed it was ex­tend­ing the deal to Jan­u­ary de­spite achiev­ing the re­quired min­i­mum share­hold­ing to take over Pres­tige in Sep­tem­ber.

The re­lease said, “De­spite ob­tain­ing the min­i­mum tar­get share­hold­ing for its takeover of Pres­tige Hold­ings Lim­it­ed, Agos­ti­ni Ltd (AGL) still awaits reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals in or­der to com­plete this trans­ac­tion. While AGL awaits the ap­point­ment of a board of the Fair Trade Com­mis­sion to re­view the trans­ac­tion, it’s of­fer to share­hold­ers of Pres­tige Hold­ings has now been ex­tend­ed to Jan­u­ary 20, 2026. This is to en­sure that reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals in­clud­ing that of the Fair Trade Com­mis­sion (FTC) is ob­tained.”

Agos­ti­ni has first pro­posed the ac­qui­si­tion of Pres­tige, a restau­rant man­age­ment com­pa­ny which over­seas sev­er­al in­ter­na­tion­al fran­chise chains in Trinidad and To­ba­go, in­clud­ing KFC, Piz­za Hut, Sub­way, Star­bucks, and TGI Fri­day, in June.

Agos­ti­ni stat­ed in the re­lease, “Agos­ti­ni ob­tained the min­i­mum tar­get share­hold­ing re­quired to fa­cil­i­tate its takeover of Pres­tige Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (PHL) in Sep­tem­ber. To date, Agos­ti­ni has ex­ceed­ed the ini­tial re­quire­ment of 90 per cent of all PHL shares not held by Vic­tor E Mout­tet Lim­it­ed (VEML) and its af­fil­i­ates or as­so­ciates at the time of the of­fer, equiv­a­lent to 96.9 per cent of all PHL shares.”

Group CEO of Agos­ti­ni Bar­ry Davis said, “We were able to sur­pass an ex­treme­ly high thresh­old re­quire­ment, and we con­tin­ue to see

PHL share­hold­ers at all lev­els recog­nis­ing and af­firm­ing the val­ue of our Of­fer. This is a tes­ti­mo­ny to not on­ly the strength of the Group, but trust in our lead­er­ship and the lega­cy that we have built over the last one hun­dred years. While we con­tin­ue to await reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals, we are ea­ger to start in­te­grat­ing PHL in­to our group and con­tin­ue our strate­gic goal of fos­ter­ing re­gion­al part­ner­ships and build­ing sus­tain­able, in­no­v­a­tive busi­ness­es.”