A PLASTIC bottle manufacturer near Selby has been bought by a rival firm a year after being rescued out of administration.

A total of 140 jobs at the Sherburn-in-Elmet factory were saved last year when Constar UK was taken over by Sherburn Acquisitions Ltd in a £4.3 million deal put together by administrators Deloitte.

Almost a year after the takeover Constar UK has now been acquired by Esterform.

The North Yorkshire factory had been part of the wider Constar Group headquartered in the US before it collapsed following the loss of a contract with PepsiCo. It supplies polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers for a variety of drinks products, with principal customers of the business previously including Britvic and Cott International.

New owner Esterform, which claims to be the largest independent converter of PET in the UK, makes 1.5 billion PET preforms and containers from its headquarters in Tenbury Wells and secondary site in Leeds.

This acquisition will take the group's overall capability to in excess of three billion units.

Esterform founder Mark Tyne said: "The two companies manufacture very similar products with a good deal of duplicate tooling, so it makes perfect sense to merge Constar into the Esterform group."

A spokesman for Esterform said it was too early to state what lies in store for the Sherburn-in-Elmet site, stating: "We are still in the early stages of evaluating the business."

The deal follows Esterform’s recent announcement to plough £8 million worth of investment into state-of-the-art manufacturing technology.

The takeover has seen the sale of the business for an undisclosed sum by Sherburn Acquisitions, an entity whose owners are affiliated with turnaround investor Greybull Capital, which is operated by the same financiers who were involved in the buyouts of Comet, Game and Rileys.

At the time of last year’s deal Deloitte said the Constar UK remained profitable, having posted turnover of around £80 million for the previous full year of trading.

The latest takeover saw lLaw firm Hillyer McKeown, led by head of corporate and commercial Phil Whitehurst, advise Esterform Packaging.