2023-09-23 10:13:00
The turbulence continues at Atos. The Alix AM fund, minority shareholder of the Atos group, filed a complaint on Friday in Paris with the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) for active and passive corruption surrounding the sale of the group’s outsourcing activities to businessman Daniel Kretinsky , AFP learned from a source close to the matter. When asked, the PNF and the fund’s lawyer, Maître Jean-Pierre Versini-Campinchi, confirmed the filing of this complaint. The public prosecutor specified that it was “under analysis”.
“There is nothing shocking regarding having asked Kretinsky to invest in Eviden” (Bertrand Meunier, president of Atos)
The Czech billionaire, involved in the ongoing rescue of the distributor Casino, will acquire the historic and heavily indebted branch of the French IT group Atos, according to an agreement announced on August 1.
Fall in valuation
The group of 110,000 employees has been facing a dizzying drop in its valuation and poor commercial and financial results since 2019, from which it is trying to escape by selling its outsourcing business (maintenance of IT assets), in structural decline.
It therefore intends to better devote itself to its new, more dynamic activities, centered on artificial intelligence, supercomputers and cybersecurity, called Eviden.
If the operation comes to an end, no later than the first quarter of 2024, one of the businessman’s companies will take control of the historic branch – which will keep the name Atos -, made up of some 52,000 employees around the world.
This operation aroused numerous criticisms, among others from minority shareholders such as the Alix AM fund.
“Opacity on the transfer project,” according to Alix AM
According to Mediapart, this fund sent a letter to Atos management and its directors on September 16 to criticize the “opacity” surrounding this proposed sale and its “relevance”. In the same letter, according to the investigation site, the Alix AM fund called Atos “to provide detailed explanations on the operations” in progress, and announced legal action to “defend the interests of the company and those of its shareholders once morest all members of the board of directors.
The protest also took a political turn, with a forum at the beginning of August by 82 Republican senators and deputies affirming that Atos must be “absolutely kept under French control”. On September 11, the president of Atos Bertrand Meunier defended this sale, explaining that Tech Foundations, the structure in which the outsourcing activities were housed, “needed 1.1 billion euros of restructuring. »
If the sale is successful, “this restructuring will now be entirely the responsibility of EPEI”, Daniel Kretinsky’s investment company.
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