Amaya selling stake in Innova Gaming Group lottery business

Canadian online gambling operator Amaya Gaming has announced plans to sell off its stake in its former lottery subsidiary business Innova Gaming Group.

On Friday, Amaya announced that it had reached a support agreement with Canadian lottery services company Pollard Banknote Limited to sell Amaya’s 40.45% stake in the Innova Gaming Group to Pollard. Pollard has agreed to make an all-cash offer of no less than C$2.10 per share for Amaya’s 8.18m shares of Innova, bringing Amaya’s potential payday to around C$17.2m (US $12.8m).

Innova, which primarily provides technology to state and provincial lottery operations, was formed in 2015 when Amaya spun off its Diamond Game Enterprises subsidiary, part of Amaya’s wholesale divestiture of its B2B operations following the company’s 2014 acquisition of the Rational Group, the parent company of online poker giant PokerStars. Innova was designed to hold all Diamond Game shares ahead of a public floatation on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Amaya offered the standard caveats that there was no guarantee that the deal would go through, and Pollard has until May 8 to formally make its share purchase offer/acquisition agreement.