8 interested in Efacec

 In Companies, Electrical and Transport Systems, News

There are eight companies, national and international, that are interested in the second attempt to re-privatise the Portuguese electrical and transport systems firm Efacec.

The deadline to deliver tenders in the reprivatisation process closed on Monday this week at 5pm.
The company is currently being managed by Parpública, an umbrella company owned by the Portuguese State that manages public companies.
Efacec was sold to the large Portuguese construction and industrial giant DST earlier this year but the European Commission’s monopolies and mergers regulator did not give the green light go-ahead in time for its own deadline and the sale was abandoned.
The Government will now progress to receiving detailed presentations from the eight interested parties for pre-selection and binding offer proposals.
The main shareholder in the company had been Angolan tycoon Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of deceased former president, José Eduardo dos Santos.
However, the international Wikileaks revelations, heavily implicated the businesswoman with allegations of corruption and fraud and the syphoning of millions of dollars from oil company Sonangol in her home country. She is currently thought to be living in Dubai avoiding an impending international arrest warrant.
This new phase in the sale is warranted because the sale to DST fell through as it did not “meet all the conditions necessary for that sale” according to the Government in a statement on 28 October 2022.
The new conditions, approved at a meeting of the Council of Ministers on 21 November, charged Parpública to adopt “reconstruction measures” to maintain the group’s operational value and meet the conditions demanded by the EC for its sale.
The Portuguese State, as the main shareholder in the company (71.73%) should give the companies the respective “financial means” in accordance with the (financial) information which in the meantime had not been shared with the potential interested parties in the reprivatisation process.
According to the new tender documents for the sale, the sale process will be shorter since only two phases will be involved and not three as had previously been the case.