The Sefton Group is to go private after decades of being a public company following ’overwhelming’ support from shareholders for the move.

Chief executive Brett Martin said it meant the hotels and hospitality group would now press ahead with re-registering the group.

Mr Martin was sending out letters to shareholders yesterday (Wednesday) announcing the result of the proxy vote.

Around 700 ordinary shareholders holding around a total of 40 million ordinary shares were entitled to cast their votes by proxy.

Mr Martin said around 27.6 million share votes were cast in favour of the move and about 50,000 votes were against the proposal from the board.

He said: ’About two thirds of everybody that was entitled to vote actually voted, which is a large number by any standards.’

He said: ’We are pleased with this result.

’It gives us the platform we need to take the business forward.

’It’s a pleasing result. You are always going to have some shares against but 27.6 million against 50,000 is pretty overwhelming.’

He said that the result showed just how engaged the shareholders were in the issues being discussed.

He suggested that similar votes in the UK would not have seen such a large turn-out of votes.

He confirmed that two shareholders turned up in person for the meeting that was held last Friday at the Sefton Hotel - even though everyone had been advised to cast their proxy votes two days before.

’Normally we would have 50 to 100 people turn up to a meeting but we were saying to people that because of the uncertainties around Covid when we put the paper work out in April, that we did not want to take the risk of people effectively being disenfranchised by turning up to vote and then finding that they could not vote.’

The Sefton Group’s shareholders were advised by the board of the plans to go private as it claimed it was preparing for recovery after the ’severe storm’ sparked in the last 15 months by the Covid-19 crisis.

But chief executive Mr Martin has denied suggestions the group is facing the decline of a hospitality empire in the island. He said the group was ’repositioning’ for the future.

Meanwhile Mr Martin said Sefton bosses were monitoring the situation regarding the opening of the island’s borders.

He said: ’We are very keen to get clarity on the government’s plans for the reopening. The Chief Minister is talking of an aspiration to open on June 28.

I do appreciate the government’s situation in all this, but from our standpoint obviously we need certainty as a business.

’The sooner we have certainty the better.’

In a circular to the firm’s shareholders, chairman Clive Parrish had predicted ’substantial losses’ will be reported in the accounts.

The chairman said there were advantages which the board says will provide the company and its directors with ’far greater flexibility than is presently the case and, over the next few years as we recover from the pandemic and seek to modernise the group’s facilities, that flexibility could be crucially important’.

Since it incorporation in 1923, the group’s holding company, Sefton Group has been a public company and as such its accounts were in the public domain.

Mr Parrish wrote: ’We have been able to reduce costs and cut back on management payroll, but we are still appreciably below break-even.’