financial director Paul Saleh becomes general manager

2024-01-15 07:17:00

New twist at Atos. The French IT group announced Monday the appointment of its financial director, Paul Saleh, to the position of general manager, replacing Yves Bernaert. The group, heavily in debt, also declares in a press release that to date it has “not not filed a request for the appointment of an ad hoc representative or the opening of a conciliation procedure », despite the difficult situation in which he finds himself, following press reports having mentioned this possibility.

This Monday, Les Echos also reported that the plan to sell the outsourcing branch of Atos, Tech Foundations, to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky is seriously compromised. According to our colleague, a meeting “ last chance » between the two parties is expected in a few days but the probability of reaching an agreement is considered very low. Paul Saleh admitted on January 3 that the exclusive negotiations with EPEI were “ taking a little longer than expected ».

Scission

As a reminder, faced with significant financial difficulties, Atos has decided to split its historical IT consulting activities and those in cybersecurity. Tech Foundations, which brings together IT consulting activities, is to be sold to Daniel Kretinsky’s EPEI group, while Atos plans to keep the cybersecurity activities, which include the BDS (Big data & security) branch, in a new entity called Eviden. Atos however noted at the beginning of the month that it had launched a “due diligence” phase with Airbus for the acquisition of BDS for which the European aeronautics and defense group proposed an enterprise value between 1.5 billion and 1.8 billion euros.