“If there is no industrial project” like the one proposed by Teract, “we consider that Daniel Kretinsky’s billion will not be enough” to save Casino, assured Moez-Alexandre Zouari in an interview with several media published on Sunday .
The distributor, which employs more than 50,000 people in France and 200,000 worldwide under many brands, including Monoprix or Franprix, has been struggling for years to get out of debt, so far without success.
“It is a group which is suffering enormously, which has been damaged by the financial pressure” of its race to reduce debt, said Moez-Alexandre Zouari. Himself a major franchisee of the Casino group in Ile-de-France, he claims as such to “know the company and the teams very well”.
Daniel Kretinsky’s project is different from ours but not incompatible
Moez-Alexandre Zouari, CEO of Teract
“Daniel Kretinsky’s project is different from ours but not incompatible, there’s no reason we can’t talk to each other since he believes in this company,” said Teract’s CEO. “I would be happy to have someone seasoned like Daniel Kretinsky join us, which we are looking forward to,” he said.
Daniel Kretinsky, already a 10% shareholder in Casino, proposed on April 24 to inject 750 million euros into the group (via a reserved capital increase of more than one billion euros in total), explaining a few days later that in his eyes “the financial situation” of Casino was “no longer tenable without rapid intervention”.
“Our offer is not contradictory with the project” of Teract, he observed in early May in an interview with the weekly Le Point, “but ours is the one that deals with the first subject of Casino: its debt” .
Moez-Alexandre Zouari, who therefore hopes to “create a climate of convergence”, considers for his part that the Czech billionaire’s offer is insufficient “if tomorrow morning when he arrives he does not have Intermarché to consolidate purchases , an industrial project that will give meaning to the dynamic, a structured project…”.
Casino has been officially discussing since February a possible merger with Teract, whose majority shareholder is the agrifood giant InVivo and which has around the table of its board of directors the founder of Free Xavier Niel and the banker of business Matthieu Pigasse. At the end of April, the third supermarket chain in France, Intermarché, joined these discussions.
Source: Le Progrès : info et actu nationale et régionale – Rhône, Loire, Ain, Haute-Loire et Jura | Le Progrès by www.leprogres.fr.
*The article has been translated based on the content of Le Progrès : info et actu nationale et régionale – Rhône, Loire, Ain, Haute-Loire et Jura | Le Progrès by www.leprogres.fr. If there is any problem regarding the content, copyright, please leave a report below the article. We will try to process as quickly as possible to protect the rights of the author. Thank you very much!
*We just want readers to access information more quickly and easily with other multilingual content, instead of information only available in a certain language.
*We always respect the copyright of the content of the author and always include the original link of the source article.If the author disagrees, just leave the report below the article, the article will be edited or deleted at the request of the author. Thanks very much! Best regards!
