The Spread Nobody Wants to Close — Apollo, easyJet and £5.7bn

Apollo agreed to buy easyJet at 715p a share. The board said yes. The founder said yes. The market still won’t pay it.

On 6 August 2026, Apollo Global Management won a ten-week bidding war for easyJet, valuing the airline at roughly £5.7 billion. Castlelake withdrew. The board recommended the offer unanimously. Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou backed it and elected to roll his family’s entire 15.3% stake into the new owner rather than take cash.

And yet the shares still trade at a wide discount to the offer.

That gap prices roughly a one-in-four chance the deal never completes — on a recommended, all-cash, founder-backed scheme that would normally close more than nine times out of ten. We went looking for the reason and found it in Brussels, not London.

This episode covers the deal terms, the fight with Castlelake, why the Iran war made easyJet cheap enough to buy, the ownership structure Apollo built to satisfy EU control rules, the European Commission review that knocked 12% off the stock in a single session, and what the merger arbitrage spread is really telling investors.