WITH HIS Cooley Distillery about to be sold to American spirits group Beam, John Teeling is contemplating his next move.

It could include some company listings on the Irish Stock Exchange. Traditionally, Teeling has preferred to list his resource companies on AIM, the junior market in London, where there is a large investment community to tap and the costs of listing are low.

“I’m going to look at listing a company or two in Dublin,” he told me this week. “There’s not much listing here [at the moment] and there are loads of investors.”

Connemara Mining, which holds lead and zinc licences in Ireland, is one possibility.

“Irish people might understand Irish zinc, the British certainly don’t,” he explained.

“There’s an Irish investor base in Dublin that doesn’t have much to play with right now.”

How right he is. CRH recently switched to London, while Greencore will head there shortly.

Teeling will probably seek a full Iseq listing rather than one on the junior ESM market in Dublin.

“I’d rather go to the main one but if they’re going to attach a lot of rules and costs I might not be able to.”

Back at Cooley, Beam’s offer document indicates that Teeling’s sons Jack and Stephen, both senior executives in the whiskey company, could take over the own- label and private-label business.

The Americans have no strategic interest in what is a low-margin business. It plans to focus on growing Cooley’s brands.

Cooley shifted about 220,000 cases of own-label and private-label Irish whiskey last year and its customers include Tesco, Dunnes Stores, Aldi and Lidl. “Preliminary discussions have been ongoing in this regard,” Beam’s document states.

“Any such arrangements will be made on an arms-length commercial basis.”