THE BIGGEST shareholder in the group that owns Cork homecare products business Punch Industries has sold its stake in a near €400 million deal whose backers include Bank of Ireland.

Axa Private Equity, part of French multinational Axa, has sold its 65.6 per cent stake in the Spotless group, which includes shoe polish and detergent manufacturer Punch and the Vim and Vigour cleaning products brands, to multinational rival BC Partners.

Reports yesterday said the sale valued Spotless at €600 million.

Bank of Ireland was one of four banks which loaned BC Partners €300 million of the finance required, over 75 per cent of the €393 million price paid. The others were HSBC, Lloyd’s, and Société Générale. It is understood that each of the four put up equal amounts of the loan.

Axa originally put its Spotless stake on the block in 2008, but debt-supported buyouts – such as yesterday’s deal – ground to a halt that year amid the turmoil that hit the global banking industry. At the time, the entire group was valued at €700 million, and Axa’s own estimate of Punch’s share of that was just over €50 million.

The price tag put on yesterday’s deal is around 14 per cent shy of the 2008 valuation, implying that Punch is worth between €42 million and €43 million.

The acquisition finance division of Bank of Ireland’s corporate banking arm provided the Irish institutions share of the finance.

The bank has been seeing “a reasonable flow of deals in the €100 million range” since the start of January, sources say.

Abigail Punch founded the business that became Punch Industries in Cork over 150 years ago as a tea importer. It branched into shoe and furniture polish and subsequently bought the shoe-care business of the Scandinavian group behind Bostik adhesives.

The Punch family sold to Spotless in December 2006.