Posted Feb 19 2022 at 8:00 amUpdated Feb 19. 2022 at 8:51 am
When two big bosses opposed to a structuring project are invited to the Senate, the upper house can turn into an arena. This is what happened during the successive hearings of Xavier Niel, the founder of Iliad (Free) and Martin Bouygues (the president of Bouygues, parent company of TF1), before the commission of inquiry into the concentration medias. The two telecoms and media heavyweights tackled the hot file of the TF1-M6 merger unceremoniously.
First auditioned, Xavier Niel explained his fierce opposition to the project. “These two groups are ultra-dominant in France in bringing us information”, hammered the boss of Free, also a shareholder of the daily “Le Monde”, denouncing the constitution of a problematic monopoly “as an industrialist and a citizen”.