Schilds to get £184m in Huntleigh sale

The Schild family will walk away with £184m after agreeing to sell Huntleigh Technology, the London-listed hospital beds business they founded, to the Swedish medical equipment group Getinge for £407m in cash.

The business was started by Rolf Schild in 1975 as an offshoot of a military equipment manufacturer. He led a management buyout in 1983, listing the group in 1985 at a share price of 16.66p. Mr Schild was the chairman until he died in 2003 - when the group was worth about £200m. Huntleigh is run by his sons, Julian Schild, the chairman, and David Schild, the chief executive, who yesterday announced they had agreed to sell out for 475p a share.

The Schild family stake, held mostly through the unlisted "A" shares, which includes shares owned by Rolf Schild's widow Daphne and his daughter Annabel, is some 45 per cent.

The Schilds shot into the headlines in August, 1979 when Rolf was kidnapped, with Daphne and Annabel, while holidaying in Sardinia. The kidnappers had mistakenly believed Rolf Schild, who had come to Britain as a penniless refugee schoolboy from Nazi Germany, to be a member of the Rothschild family.

Mr Schild was released after 16 days withinstructions to raise £11m - a sum that, at the time, was out of all proportion to the family's wealth - and months of tense bargaining with the kidnappers followed. The ordeal was not helped by suggestions in the British tabloid press that the family was much richer than they actually were and even that Mr Schild was somehow involved in the crime. Daphne was set free in January, but Annabel, then 15, was only freed in March 1980 after a plea to the kidnappers from the Pope. The final ransom paid was £220,000. Two years later, 13 men were found guilty of the abduction and jailed.

Announcing the transaction yesterday - which came at a 28 per cent premium to Huntleigh's share price on Thursday - Julian Schild said: "Getinge's offer represents fair value for Hunt-leigh's shareholders and reflects the substantial pro-gress made since we floated on the USM [Unlisted Securities Market] in 1985. I believe the combination of Huntleigh and Getinge creates a leading European-based group to service the global healthcare market."

Huntleigh's mechanical beds, built to Rolf Schild's designs, are engineered to try to prevent patients getting bed sores. Getinge has expertise in hoists used for moving patients in hospitals.