Shareholders buy up Global Media debts from banks

Key shareholders of Global Media have bought up the debts of the company from Portuguese banks at a 80-85% knockdown price.

The acquisitions by Kevin Ho and José Pedro Soeiro also entailed purchasing the capital that the two banks – Novo Banco and BCP – held in the company.
The annoucement regarding the purchase of both the capital and debt of Global Media was made in a letter sent to the employees by the Global Media board on Christmas Eve reports online news source Eco.
“We have consistently reduced our debts to the banks from 2014 until 2018 through the sale of assets. In 2019 we took a fresh step towards making the group more financially sustainable through restructuring while the shareholders acquired the debts and capital shares held by the banks Millennium BCP and Novo Banco thereby reducing the bank debt to marginal amounts”, states the email sent out to mark Christmas and New Year.
According to the Board headed by Daniel Proença de Carvalho, “this reduction also enabled the cancelling of assets given to the banks as guarantees.”
The concrete amount of the trasnaction has not been revealed in terms of how much the group’s shareholders paid to the banks. The losses accepted by the banks were also not revealed, but various sources suggest a ‘pardon’ of up to 85% of the total amount that Global Media still owes the banks.
An official source at Global Media declined to comment on the “relationships” of the group’s shareholders while BCP and Novo Banco also declined to comment.
The group’s main shareholder, the Macanese inverstor Kevin Ho and Portuguese entrepreneur José Pedro Soeiro both control around 60% of Global Media.
At the end of November Global Media arrived at an agreement to sell Naveprinter, the printing firm based in Maia, close to Porto, a sale which was seen as essential to help finance the restructuring of the company.