Cofina abandons PAO for TVI
A competition for the control of the Portuguese Media Capital group which owns TV station TVI has ended after a rival media entity Cofina pulled out of the race.
This was because an independent auditor set a price of 72.5 cents a share for Media Capital shares which they deemed as an essential condition for all and any public offers from Cofina.
There have been several candidates vying for total control over the media group: the first is from Pluris which is owned by pleasure boat and hotel mogul Mário Ferreira, then the group controlled by Paulo Fernandes (Cofina) which has now announced to the market that it is no longer pursuing its voluntary offer to buy 95% of the capital.
“It was a condition of the launch (by Cofina) that the independent auditor appointed by the CMVM (stock market securities commission) for the calculation of the counter offer, should not set a unit value that would exceed €0.413 per share, so that it informs that it does not intend to renounce this condition,” states the communiqué published on the CMVM site.
In other words Cofina wanted to pay no more than €0.412 and the auditor set €0.72,5 per share.
Cofina has underway an obligatory PAO decided by CMVM on 5.13% of Media Capital, at a price that has been set by the independent auditor.
It announced that it would make a general offer on the other 94.69% under specific conditions. One of them was that the counter offer would not exceed €0.41,5 cents, which has not occurred. If it acquires 5.31%, the owner of Correio da Manhã will have to pay almost €3.3 million.
In any case, Pluris was also obliged to launch an offer on the 69.78% of Media Capital that it does not control and also awaited the price to be set by the independent auditor.
But under the terms of the law, it would still have to pay 2% above the Cofina offer. Now with Cofina out of the game, Mário Ferreira is the sole bidder in the market.
Moreover, it is not a done deal that the PAO by Mário Ferreira will result in him increasing his share. This is because in November last year, Prisa, which had owned the controlling share, sold all of that share that it had in Media Capital (64.47%) to a group of independent Portuguese investors including Triun, CIN and Polopiqué for €0.67 per share.
Abanca already had 5% of the owner of TVI (Media Capital), when Prisa controlled the company, which is why there is actually an 0.26% ‘free-float´ in the market.