No Olympic truce for Patrick Drahi. Faced with the over-indebtedness of several of his companies, including the telecoms operator SFR in France, which alone owes 24.3 billion euros, the businessman has been selling off assets for the past two weeks.
The latest, that of BT, announced on Monday 12 August. The 24.5% stake in the capital of the British operator will be sold to the Indian Bharti, founded and managed by Sunil Bharti Mittal (no relation to Lakshmi Mittal, the owner of ArcelorMittal), pioneer of mobile telephones on the subcontinent under the Airtel brand and the country’s eleventh fortune, according to the 2023 ranking of Forbes.
The transaction will be done in two stages: Bharti will buy 9.99%, then take the remaining 14.51% once the green light from the British authorities has been obtained. The amount of the transaction has not been disclosed, but, based on BT’s value on the London Stock Exchange, it is estimated at 3.2 billion pounds (3.74 billion euros), which will allow Mr. Drahi to recoup his investment, while the fall in BT shares in 2023, before its recent recovery, had put him in danger.
8.2 billion euros of financial transactions in two months
Mr Drahi’s British company Altice UK had paid around £3.5bn to build up the 24.5% stake between 2021 and 2023, but as explained by the Financial Times July 21these purchases were financed on credit. The amount paid by Bharti will be used to repay these financings.
The announcement of the sale of BT comes just three days after that of part of Sotheby’s to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, ADQ. The latter will participate in a capital increase of 1 billion dollars (915 million euros) in order to reduce by almost half the debt of the auction house owned by Patrick Drahi since 2019. The share of ADQ is not specified, but the businessman will remain the majority shareholder of Sotheby’s.
On August 2, Altice International, another company owned by Patrick Drahi, announced the sale of the advertising agency Teads to the American company Outbrain for $1 billion, of which $725 million was paid in cash.
This salvo of sales follows the finalization, in early July, of the sale of Altice Media (BFM-TV, RMC, etc.) to CMA CGM, for 1.55 billion euros, and that, in mid-June, of 70% of SFR’s data centers to an investment fund of the American bank Morgan Stanley, for 535 million euros. Added to this are 500 million euros in dividends from XpFibre, the SFR subsidiary specializing in the deployment of optical fiber. In total, Patrick Drahi has therefore carried out more than 8.2 billion euros in financial transactions in two months.
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