Will your neighborhood Casino or area be transformed into an Intermarché? Serge Papin, director of Auchan Retail International, confirmed this Thursday the existence of a joint offer with Les Mousquetaires/Intermarché to buy back all of the hypermarkets and supermarkets not yet sold by the distributor in serious financial difficulty, Casino.
However, the bosses of the two groups “Yves Claude and Thierry Cotillard have not necessarily submitted all the ingredients which constitute the offer”, he specified on BFM Business. Serge Papin did not provide information on the price of the offer, nor the total number of stores, nor the distribution between the two buyers.
Saved jobs promise Auchan and Intermarché
Casino confirmed on Thursday that it had “received to date preliminary indicative offers from several buyers” for the purchase of “different scopes” of hypermarkets and supermarkets. “I believe that everyone has made proposals, Carrefour must have made some, Leclerc must have made some too,” said Serge Papin, before defending the joint offer from his Auchan group and the Les Mousquetaires/Intermarché group which concerns “the whole [des magasins] », a “reassuring” criterion from a social point of view, according to him. “Jobs are kept in the project” of Auchan and Intermarché, affirmed Serge Papin. “There will perhaps be some logistical tools” included in the takeover offer, “but it mainly concerns stores,” he said.
Casino for its part indicated that it “will not give details on the content of the offers which are currently being examined” and adds that “any sale operation must be previously approved by the consortium” candidate for the takeover of Casino around the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky and the Frenchman Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. Intermarché already agreed with Casino a few months ago for the purchase of 119 stores, plus around sixty as an option. Around sixty changed brands at the beginning of October.
Other potential buyers
Wednesday morning, the investigative media The letter indicated that two pairs of brands, Système U-Lidl on one side, Intermarché-Auchan on the other, had positioned themselves to take over all or part of Casino’s large format stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets.
“There is no alliance between Système U and Lidl for a purchase of stores of the Casino brand,” reacted on X (ex-Twitter) the CEO of Système U Dominique Schelcher, a spokesperson for the brand having previously “formally” denied the information to the AFP. As for Lidl, it indicated a few months ago to the British fund Attestor that it was interested in taking over around 300 Casino and 300 Monoprix, another brand of the group in financial difficulty.