The sale returns a Canadian retail dynasty to the British high street and hands Sycamore a large exit from the Walgreens Boots Alliance buyout, little more than a year after closing it
Wittington Investments, the holding company of Canada’s Weston family, and Fairfax Financial Holdings have agreed to buy Boots from Sycamore Partners and the Pessina family for $8.9bn including assumed debt. The deal, announced on October 7, covers Boots’ retail operations in the UK and Ireland, Boots Opticians, the No7 Beauty Company and Boots’ businesses in Thailand and its franchised markets, according to a statement filed by Fairfax with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Fairfax, the Toronto insurance and investment group whose chairman and chief executive is Prem Watsa, has committed up to $2.3bn of equity and will own half of Boots after completion. Wittington will hold the other half and keep operational control, with Galen Weston, its chair, becoming chair of Boots. Completion is expected in the first quarter of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions.
Sycamore and the Pessinas are not leaving pharmacy altogether. They will keep the rest of The Boots Group, Farmacias Benavides in Mexico and the wholesaler Alliance Healthcare Deutschland.
A quick turn for Sycamore
The sale comes little more than 13 months after Sycamore completed its take-private of Walgreens Boots Alliance on August 28, 2025. Shareholders were paid $11.45 a share in cash, plus a right to up to $3.00 more from any sale of VillageMD, and Stefano Pessina and his family rolled 100% of their holding into the new private group, according to Walgreens’ filing at the time. Sycamore then split the company into five standalone businesses: Walgreens, The Boots Group, Shields Health Solutions, CareCentrix and VillageMD.
Breaking a conglomerate into separate companies lets a buyout firm sell the parts to whoever values each one most, rather than wait for a single buyer for the whole. Boots, with more than 1,800 stores and more than 51,000 staff in the UK at the end of November 2024 according to the company’s own figures, is the best-known name in the group outside the US.
The terms leave important questions open. Neither the Fairfax statement nor the Walgreens filings set out what share of the 2025 purchase price Sycamore assigned to Boots, so the return on this partial exit cannot be calculated from public documents. How much of the $8.9bn is debt, and how much of it the new owners will refinance, has also not been disclosed.
A pharmacy operator’s bet
For the Westons, the deal is a return to British retail. The family owned Selfridges, the London department store, from 2003 until 2021, and Wittington is the majority shareholder of Associated British Foods, the owner of Primark. In Canada the family controls Loblaw, which owns the Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacy chain. That gives the new owners direct experience of running a high-street chemist that relies on prescriptions and beauty sales.
“Boots is one of Britain’s most enduring businesses, with a rich heritage, a trusted name and a vital role in everyday life,” Weston said in the statement. Watsa said Fairfax was “very pleased to partner with Galen Weston and the Wittington team”.
For Wittington, splitting the equity cheque with Fairfax halves its exposure to the chain while leaving the running of it in Weston hands.
The deal still needs regulatory clearance before the Westons can take over in 2027, and the cost of the debt they assume will decide how far they can deliver the “further capital investment” the statement promises.