A ten minute recorded message. This is the time devoted by the management of Altice France to the presentation, Tuesday May 28, of the first quarter results of the telecoms operator SFR, the main asset of Patrick Drahi’s group in France. No question-and-answer session with analysts and investors as she usually does every quarter. Too many demands, she justified, but above all it is a way of not addressing the angry subject: the 24.3 billion euros in debt of Altice France.
On March 20, Dennis Okhuijsen, Patrick Drahi’s financial advisor, and his treasurer, Gerrit Jan Bakker, angered the operator’s creditors by warning them that they would probably not recover all of the sums lent . Since then, it has been the Cold War.
The creditors, most of them large Anglo-Saxon banks and investment funds, have organized themselves by signing a cooperation agreement committing them to act with one voice. For its part, Altice France has mandated the investment banks Lazard and JP Morgan to help it in this matter which promises to be the new major French financial soap opera, with sums at stake four to five times greater than those of Casino and Atos.
If the creditors come together, Patrick Drahi seems ready to play with their nerves. In its ten-minute message, management announced that XpFibre, SFR’s subsidiary in the deployment of optical fiber, has repaid a shareholder loan to Altice France for an amount of 223.1 million euros, and the shares of this company were moved into a holding company called ” without restriction “ over which creditors have no control.
He did the same with Altice Media (BFM-TV, RMC, etc.), the audiovisual subsidiary currently being sold to CMA CGM, and the data centers sold to a fund of the American bank Morgan Stanley. His message: without any effort from creditors on the debt, the money will remain safe in these holding companies.
10 billion euros in interest since 2014
At Altice France, we put the anger of creditors into perspective by recalling that, until now, they have had no reason to complain: since 2014, the operator has paid them more than 10 billion euros in interest . And with a little less than a billion euros in liquidity, and without a major deadline between now and 2027, Patrick Drahi thinks he can win a war of attrition with investors who don’t like being stuck in this way. Some are already starting to get impatient. According to Bloomberg, Société Générale sought to resell part of its receivables on the market but did not find a buyer.
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