The Issa brothers split their empire. One keeps Asda, the other takes the forecourts.
Mohsin and Zuber Issa, who together bought Asda for £6.8 billion, have divided their business interests. One is stepping back; the other is eyeing a US IPO.
In October 2020, Mohsin and Zuber Issa, together with private equity firm TDR Capital, bought Asda from Walmart for £6.8 billion. The brothers had built EG Group, a petrol forecourt and convenience business, from a single station in Bury into a global operation. Buying a national supermarket chain was the most visible thing they had ever done.
Less than five years later, the brothers have gone their separate ways.
How it unravelled
In 2023, EG Group sold the majority of its UK petrol stations to Asda. In March 2024, it emerged that Zuber Issa would take most of EG Group’s remaining UK assets and operate them through a new company called EG On The Move.
By September 2024, Mohsin had stepped back from running Asda. In April 2025, he stepped down as CEO of EG Group too, replaced by CFO Russell Colaco. Mohsin remains on the EG board as a non-executive director and holds a 22.5 per cent minority stake in Asda.
Zuber has sold his Asda shareholding entirely and is now focused on EG On The Move.
The split is clean in corporate terms, less clean in personal ones. These are two brothers who ran everything together. Now they run nothing together.
The IPO question
EG Group has been exploring a listing in New York, with a reported target valuation of around $13 billion (£10.7 billion). To prepare, the company has been selling its European and Australian operations to reduce debt.
Whether the IPO happens, and at what price, will depend on market conditions and on how well the company can present a standalone story without the brothers as a joint operating team. The US market is now EG’s largest region by sales, and the new leadership is based there. Mohsin has said the US is “where EG needs to have its lead executives.”
What it tells you
Family business splits do not always mean failure. Sometimes they mean growth. The Issa brothers built something large enough that it made more sense as two operations than as one. The risk is that the split was driven not by strategy but by strain, and that neither entity performs as well alone as the combined group did together.
For families running large, diversified businesses with more than one principal, the Issa story is a case worth studying. Joint ownership works until it doesn’t, and the transition from shared control to separation is rarely tidy. Having a mechanism for it, ideally agreed before it is needed, is the difference between a managed demerger and a public unravelling.
