Pro7: Berlusconi will get up to two seats on the supervisory board

On a late summer day, Rainer Beaujean begins his last stand. Behind the manager are grueling years of the pandemic and struggles with an Italian bunga-bunga billionaire. He now stands in front of his own workforce and talks his head and neck. “If you don’t like it here, you can go,” the CEO of Pro7Sat1 throws at his employees. His employees would certainly have a more comfortable job at the Munich public utility company, the CEO says afterwards.

It’s the last company meeting at the end of September, where Beaujean’s collar bursts. As the coronavirus plunged the economy into uncertainty for more than two years, the CEO struggled to avoid downsizing. He managed to do that, but he had to save elsewhere: there were no salary increases for the workforce for months. At the meeting, the works council and employees grill him for the lack of wage increases until he loses his composure. A few days later it’s over, the group puts Beaujean out of the door.

Andreas Wiele is the driving force behind Beaujean’s departure

According to Business Insider, the driving force behind his dismissal was Andreas Wiele. Both men had fundamentally different ideas about the strategic direction of the group. For years, Beaujean relied on a three-pillar strategy for the group, a kind of holy trinity: entertainment, dating platforms and the Commerce & Ventures segment. The group includes Elitepartner, Parship and the US dating platform Eharmony.

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Wiele, on the other hand, demanded a clear profile: What does Pro7Sat1 stand for? Where is the group headed? What is the “North Star” the company is heading towards? Apparently, Beaujean found no satisfactory answers to these questions.

According to insiders, the temperaments of the top managers should not have harmonized either. As CFO for many years, Beaujean is a numbers person who tended to plan in five-year horizons and wanted to turn the group into a solid business case. Wiele, a long-standing Springer board member (disclaimer: Business Insider belongs to the Axel Springer Group), comes from the operational side and called for a vision for Pro7Sat1.

The DNA of Pro7Sat1: entertainment

This is now to be presented by the new board member, Bert Habets, in a few weeks, we learned from company circles. The core: Pro7Sat1 should be understood primarily as a media company. The core of the business and the identity of the people of Munich is entertainment. No wonder that Wiele helped Habets, a television and streaming expert, to the top of the group. The Munich company’s main focus in the coming years will be on significantly expanding the group’s streaming offering and conquering market share on the Internet. It also sounds like a declaration of war on the streaming giants Netflix and Amazon, but much more on the competitor from Cologne. A few years ago, RTL had lofty goals with RTL +, which CEO Thomas Rabe has largely conceded in recent months.

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With Habets, Wiele also conceded a taboo from Beaujean and the former chairman of the supervisory board, Werner Brand. Wiele and Habets have recently been speaking to the major shareholder MFE, the media empire of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. For years there was an iron silence between the top management and the representatives of Berlusconi, but Wiele is of the opinion that you have to come to terms with the largest shareholder. The group is managed by Berlusconi’s son Pier Silvio. MFE is not the same as Berlusconi, according to Wiele. He also prefers the Italians to investors from China or Qatar. The risk of the station becoming politicized is significantly higher for the latter two than for the Italians, who are ultimately still democrats.

At Pro7Sat1, a decision will soon be made on the allocation of four positions on the supervisory board. According to our information, MFE claims two of them for itself. Roof boss Katharina Behrens, who works at MFE, should occupy one seat. Your choice is also considered set at Pro7Sat1, we learned unanimously from corporate circles. We were told that if MFE fills the second seat with a more independent representative, his election is also considered very likely. The “Handelsblatt” reported on Friday that Donata Hopfen, former DFL boss, is to take the third vacant seat on the supervisory board.

The billionaire’s wish is rejected

The new player in the power structure of Pro7Sat1 is applying for fourth place: the Czech investor group PPF, behind which stands the billionaire Renata Kellnerova. She joined the group at the end of February and now holds ten percent of the shares. After just a little over two weeks, Kellnerova is already demanding a seat on the supervisory board.

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It’s not the first time that the Czechs have invested in Pro7Sat1. The billionaire Daniel Kretinsky joined the media group in 2019 at a price of EUR 12.50 per share and sold his shares for EUR 17 per share around a year and a half later. In the meantime he held up to ten percent of the shares in Pro7Sat1. Kretinsky is in a relationship with the daughter of Kellnerova. MFE apparently perceives the Czechs as competition, because it was heard from circles within the group that Kretinsky was a “questionable figure” who was more interested in short-term profit.

In any case, Kellnerova will not get a seat on the supervisory board, Business Insider learned. The Czechs are not invested enough for that, and the shareholders don’t even know what Kellnerova plans to do with Pro7Sat1. So far it is only known that she supports the digitization of the company. A very vague statement. As company insiders put it, “You don’t go to bed with someone after your first drink.”