Teract (Gamm Vert, Jardiland, Boulangeries Louise) CEO Moez-Alexandre Zouari, who has been negotiating for several months to take over the French business of dealer Casino, called Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, author of a separate book. he offer, to work together, in an interview given to various media including AFP.
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 to get out of debt for years, so far without success.
“This is a group that suffers enormously, that has been hurt by the financial pressure” of their race to reduce debt, Moez-Alexandre Zouari said. He himself, one of the main franchisees of the Casino group in Ile-de-France, claims as such “to know the company and the teams very well”.
“Our offer is not contradictory to the project”
Daniel Kretinsky, already a 10% shareholder of Casino, proposed on April 24 to inject 750 million euros into the group (through a reserved capital increase of more than a billion euros in total), explaining a few days later that in his eyes “the financial situation” of the Casino “was no longer tenable without prompt intervention”.
“Our offer is not contradictory to the project” by Teract, he observed at the beginning of May in an interview with the weekly Le Point, “but ours is the one that deals with Casino’s first issue: its debt.”
Moez-Alexandre Zouari, who therefore hopes to “create a climate of convergence”, considers for his part that the offer from the Czech billionaire 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 dynamics, a structured project…”.
Since February, Casino has been officially analyzing a possible merger with Teract, whose majority shareholder is the agri-food giant InVivo and which has the founder of Free Xavier Niel and business banker Matthieu Pigasse around the table of its board of directors. At the end of April, the third largest supermarket chain in France, Intermarché, joined these discussions.
Source: BFM TV
