Not in an asset purchase — the certificate of accreditation is issued to a specific premises, so a new owner needs its own certificate for every store before it can open the doors, and a nine-store acquisition is nine separate applications running in parallel, not one.
Short answer
Not in an asset purchase — the certificate of accreditation is issued to a specific premises, so a new owner needs its own certificate for every store before it can open the doors, and a nine-store acquisition is nine separate applications running in parallel, not one.
Section 139(1) of the Drug and Pharmacies Regulation Act provides: “No person shall establish or operate a pharmacy unless a certificate of accreditation has been issued in respect thereof” A pharmacy is defined in section 1(1) as “a premises in or in part of which prescriptions are compounded or dispensed for the public or drugs are sold by retail”. The unit of approval is the physical premises — so a chain of stores is a chain of separate approvals, each able to succeed or fail on its own facts.
In a share purchase, the corporation holding the certificates does not change, so its certificates carry on. In an asset purchase, the operator changes at every location, and section 139(2) makes clear that the applicant, the pharmacy and its proposed operation are assessed together, per site — success at eight stores says nothing about the ninth, and a proposed refusal or condition is referred to the Accreditation Committee, a process with its own timetable.
Section 146(1) requires every pharmacy to be “under the supervision of a pharmacist who is physically present” and “managed by a pharmacist who is designated as the designated manager by the owner of the pharmacy”. The designated manager is a per-pharmacy office — two stores that have historically shared one designated manager need a second person named and recruited before either site’s application is complete.
A buyer acquiring several stores by way of assets should expect to close in tranches matched to each store’s own certification timeline, not on a single date, and should budget the transaction for the possibility that one site’s application is delayed or refused without holding up the rest. Operating a store before its own certificate has issued is a contravention of s.139(1) with both corporate and personal exposure attached.
The multi-store version of exactly this problem is worked through in Treadstone Academy’s Case Files: a nine-store pharmacy acquisition that closed in three tranches over fourteen weeks to match each store’s own certification and the different DPRA clock that runs when a pharmacy owner dies before a sale closes.
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