ATHENS/LONDON: A total of six firms have submitted binding bids to buy Greece’s cash-strapped telecom Wind Hellas, an official close to the sale process said on Friday.
The bidders include Wind Hellas’s current owner, Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris, the company’s senior secured bondholders and Cayman-island based Argo Capital Partners Fund, other people close to the sale said.
Greece’s third-biggest telecom Wind Hellas put itself up for sale in July after it started its second debt restructuring talks with bondholders within a year to avoid missing debt payments. A deadline to submit binding bids expired on Thursday.
Bankers have said that Norway’s Telenor had "a serious ambition" concerning Wind Hellas. But a company spokesman declined on Friday to comment, saying it was not company policy to make comments on M&A activity.
Wind Hellas is seeking a fresh cash injection, which would likely be provided by the winning bidder, and needs to further cut its debt pile, after reducing it by over €1 billion last year to about €1.8 billion.
Wind Hellas underwent a similar process late last year, when Weather put in a restructuring bid for the company, sold it and then bought it back — minus a chunk of junior debt — with the backing of senior lenders, a mechanism known in Britain as a pre-pack administration.
Argo, bondholders could cooperate
Earlier on Friday, an official close to the sale said that Argo Capital Partners Fund has offered to buy Wind Hellas. "Argo has submitted a binding bid," the official told Reuters.
Argo has submitted its bid independently from Wind Hellas’s bondholders, but is open to cooperating with them at a later stage, he added.
"If (Argo’s) bid is turned down, (Wind Hellas’s) bondholders could look at it as complementary to their own move, if they decide to convert their bonds into shares and become shareholders," the official said.
Some Wind Hellas bondholders are fighting a bid from Sawiris, who has controlled Wind Hellas through Weather Investments. These senior secured bondholders, who own just over €1.2 billion of bonds, have also bid for the company, two sources close to the debt negotiations said.
The bondholders are open to proposals from outside bidders, people close to the matter said on Thursday.
Argo and Wind Hellas declined to comment. Argo has a stake in On Telecoms, a Greek rival of Wind Hellas. –Additional reporting by Wojciech Moskwa in Oslo
