Naggar in £21m bid for Chez Gerard restaurants

The heat was turned up in the restaurant sector yesterday as Guy Naggar, the corporate raider, lodged a £20.6m bid for Groupe Chez Gerard, while Signature Restaurants' largest shareholder revealed it had "no intention" of backing Luke Johnson's attempt to take the company private.

Paramount, Mr Naggar's cash shell, made its indicative offer after meeting the board of Chez Gerard last week. Shareholders will receive 100p in cash per share – a 60 per cent premium to the group's share price the day before the approach was made last month – or five Paramount shares for every Chez Gerard share held.

Although Chez Gerard, which owns the Bertorelli and Livebait chains, agreed to open its books for Mr Naggar, the group added there could be "no certainty" that a firm offer would follow. Its shares rose 12 per cent to 87.5p.

City sources point to the possibility of Neville Abraham, Chez Gerard's founder who retook the helm at the troubled group earlier this year, launching a counter bid to take it private. Mr Naggar, who chairs the corporate finance boutique Dawnay Day, claims to have the support of 51 per cent of Chez Gerard's investors including JO Hambro, the investment firm that has built a 29.7 per cent stake.

Meanwhile, Mr Johnson's £24.7m bid for Signature, formerly Belgo Group, looked under threat after rival restaurateur Giuliano Lotto moved closer to launching a competing offer in an attempt to get his hands on London hotspots The Ivy and Le Caprice. Park Place Capital, a hedge fund that has a 29.5 per cent stake in Signature and which is operating in concert with Mr Lotto and his A-Z Restaurants group, said it had "no present intention" of accepting the 60p-per-share bid. It added that it was "considering its options". Like Chez Gerard, Signature has suffered from a mixture of over-exuberant expansion and the slump in tourist numbers to London.