MILAN. The meeting of Tim’s board of directors, urgently requested by three directors to give a boost to the replacement of the outgoing Arnaud de Puyfontaine, CEO of Vivendi, ends without votes, turning into an interlocutory passage. As known, there is already a candidate on the table, proposed with a letter by the first French shareholder (Vivendi has 23.75%) and it is that of the former president of Leonardo and before that number one of Aise, the former general of the Gdf Luciano Carta. But during the session, everything ended only in an update on the work of the nomination and remuneration committee which has been carrying out the preliminary investigation for a week. As happened for the last two co-optations, those of Giulio Gallazzi (who took the place of Luca De Meo) and Massimo Sarmi (who took over from Frank Cadoret) also for this third round the committee wants to propose a list of names among which to carry out the choice, names whose selection the headhunters work on. It will not be easy to find alternative candidates to Vivendi, especially after the last meeting has already rejected two and given that the chosen one will remain in office for less than a year, given that next spring the meeting will have to renew the board. In any case, with other names or without, the board of directors has decided to speed up the times, setting itself the goal of co-opting the new director by 16 June. Otherwise, Vivendi has another card to play: to ask for an ad hoc meeting to be convened. In short, the aim is to arrive at 22 June with a fully reconstituted board of directors when it comes to deciding on the final offers of Kkr and the Cdp-Macquarie consortium. While Tim addresses the governance issues – with the watchful eye of Consob, which has placed the evolution of the situation under observation – the two sides work on preparing the latest non-binding offers for the network to be presented by 9 June.
Both Kkr and Cdp-Macquarie, however, would not intend to raise the overall price of the proposal, equal respectively to 19 billion (plus 2 of any earn-outs linked to the merger with Open Fiber and the Rab concession) and 19.3 billion, both far from French estimates. On the other hand, a remodulation of the offers is being studied with a tweaking, for example, of the cash destined to reduce Tim’s debt. Cdp and the Australian fund, on the other hand, must also overcome the doubts of Tim’s board of directors relating to antitrust issues (the two are the shareholders of the competitor Open Fiber) which a first letter of explanations would not have completely dispelled. —