2023-08-06 06:34:26
Franco-Israeli risk-all billionaire Patrick Drahi is set to step up Monday and Tuesday to defend his telecoms empire he has built at an accelerated pace on both sides of the Atlantic. But the machine risks jamming since the revelation of a corruption scandal at the heart of his group.
He will speak at conferences on the sidelines of the publication of the results of Altice International and Altice France, to reassure creditors, following the arrest in mid-July in Portugal of his right arm Armando Pereira, suspected of having enriched himself with business costs.
“It’s important for him to speak. Until proven otherwise, Altice is a victim of all this,” defended one of his followers, Arthur Dreyfuss, CEO of Altice France, before the unions on Wednesday.
If the Franco-Israeli entrepreneur is admired for his meteoric rise and his shrewd sense of risk, his financial arrangements frighten the French establishment, while his management methods are denounced by the unions and certain shareholders.
– John Malone, the model –
Son of two mathematics teachers, born in Casablanca (Morocco) on August 20, 1963 and arrived in France at the age of 15, Patrick Drahi went through the largest schools in the Republic, chaining Maths sup, Maths spé and Polytechnique .
After graduating, he began his career with Philips, then was hired by UPC, the European subsidiary of Liberty Global, the group of John Malone, the king of American cable whom he takes as a model.
Putting his talents as an engineer and financier to good use, he set up on his own by buying one by one small regional cable operators in bad shape.
In France, he discreetly builds Noos, which will become Numericable. But it was the acquisition of SFR, a target eight times bigger (13.4 billion euros), which propelled it to center stage in March 2014, following a Homeric fight once morest Bouygues.
After swallowing up Portugal Telecom (7.4 billion euros), it continued its expansion the following year in the United States by acquiring Suddenlink, the seventh American cable operator (9 billion dollars) then Cablevision (17, $7 billion).
In France, it expanded its audiovisual portfolio by taking over RMC and BFMTV in particular, which enabled it to strengthen its weight in the media landscape.
– 50 billion debt –
Discreet, Patrick Drahi has taken advantage of the confidence of the markets, which lend him money with a vengeance and at historically low interest rates.
In 2016, he boldly declared before a senatorial commission: “I sleep much more easily with 50 billion (euros) of debt than with the first 50,000 francs that I contracted when I created my business.”
One of his last bets, at more than three billion euros, announced in September 2020, consisted in withdrawing his group Altice Europe from the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, where it was undervalued in his eyes, to free itself from market constraints.
But the rise in rates is now a problem for Altice, whose debt is classified by rating agencies in the “highly speculative” category.
Contrary to its growth strategy, the group has embarked on a vast program of asset sales, for example partially selling the pylons of its mobile telephone networks in France and Portugal.
At the same time, its manager invited himself personally to the capital of BT, the incumbent British operator, and even offered himself, to everyone’s surprise, the prestigious auction house Sotheby’s in June 2019 for 3.7 billion. euros.
On the managerial level, his management through job cuts and drastic budget cuts has earned him fierce opponents among the unions.
His tax resident status in Switzerland, where he has lived with his family since he was 35, is also pointed out by his detractors, even if his French assets are still registered in France.
Thirteenth French fortune according to the 2023 ranking of the magazine Challenges, two places behind its competitor Xavier Niel, its assets are valued at 10.7 billion euros.
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