ALL 11,000 staff at the combined Saga and AA will be granted shares in the business’s parent company, which will be called Acromas Holdings.

The decision to award the equity to the workers - who will own up to 4% of the group – follows the success of a scheme to grant shares to staff in Saga after a management buyout in 2004. Now that the insurance and holiday company for the overfifties is merging with AA, the motoring organisation, management hopes to repeat the exercise. Full-time AA workers will also each receive a cash bonus of £1,000.

Andrew Goodsell, chief executive of the combined group, will confirm the plans this week alongside a number of other initiatives and investments.

He will also confirm the new name for the holding company, which was thought up internally rather than by outside consultants.

Saga, owned by Charterhouse, a buyout firm, announced it would be merging with the AA, jointly backed by Permira and CVC, the private-equity investors, in June.

The deal was completed last week with the three investment firms owning the bulk of the shares. Management will also own a significant stake, with the staff accounting for the remaining equity. The business is valued at £6.1 billion, of which about £4.8 billion is debt.

Barclays and Mizuho underwrote the debt taken on as part of the deal. They will eventually look to syndicate a large part of it but that will be impossible until the market turmoil subsides.

Part of the rationale for the merger was to find more ways of each company’s products to be sold to customers of the other. Goodsell said: “There are cross-selling opportunities. For example, the AA does not have a travel business. But the real opportunity is taking what the AA does and doing more of it and doing it more efficiently.”

He plans to invest £15m in technology to improve both the call centres and the systems available to road patrols to boost the service to members. Goodsell said there were also plans for more patrols.

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