PARIS (Reuters) -Vivendi may challenge a court ruling requiring France’s market watchdog to look again at whether shareholders should have received a mandatory buyout offer when the group split last year, its secretary general said on Monday.
The former media group spun off its Canal+, Louis Hachette and Havas businesses in December, listing them separately as standalone companies in London, Paris and Amsterdam.
The break-up was approved by more than 97% of the group’s shareholders.
However it faced strong opposition from some minority shareholders, who argued that the split would increase top shareholder Bollore SE’s grip on Vivendi and its now former entities at their expense.
In a rare move, the Paris Court of Appeal last week overruled the French markets authority, the AMF, ruling that billionaire Vincent Bollore controlled the Vivendi group and that the securities regulator should reexamine the spin-off.
If the AMF says a mandatory buyout should have taken place, a reversal of the split seems unlikely, but shareholders’ compensation could be considered.
Speaking to shareholders on Monday, Vivendi Secretary General Frederic Crepin said the court’s opinion that the Bollore group controlled Vivendi in the legal sense was “entirely questionable”. Bollore has a 29.3% stake in Vivendi.
(Reporting by Florence Loeve; Writing by Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Jan Harvey)
