The week is decisive for the future of Presstalis, the main press messenger in France, whose fate was to be fixed Tuesday morning by the Paris commercial court, which finally put its judgment under advisement on Friday. Presstalis will then know if it is liquidated or if it can continue its activities.
In default of payments since April 20, a first hearing had been postponed three weeks ago in order to give the shareholder publishers time to agree on a very heavy restructuring plan, made inevitable by the situation of the company, in loss and heavily in debt. In this perspective, the two Presstalis cooperatives - that of the daily newspapers all distributed by Presstalis, and that of the magazines - failed to reach agreement. The condition for state support was that the two press families get along.
In the absence of an agreement Monday evening, the cooperative of daily newspapers chaired by Louis Dreyfus, also chairman of the board of directors of the Le Monde group, however made a takeover offer during the night which it hopes to see supported by other publishers magazines. The national daily newspapers (Le Monde, Le Figaro, L'Equipe, Les Echos, Liberation, La Croix, L'Humanité) offer to take over 265 of the 400 employees in Ile-de-France, including 120 of the 210 head offices, and 145 of the 193 stations at the Bobigny platform, which manages the distribution of daily newspapers.
However, this offer would not include the recovery of level 2 deposits (press deposits in the provinces) managed by the SAD, which has 500 employees and distributes newspapers outside Ile-de-France. This last point made the employees of the SAD jump, who blocked several print shops on Tuesday morning preventing the distribution of newspapers over a large part of the territory and who risk repeating their actions tomorrow Wednesday with the same consequences.
The choice of magazines
The financing plan for this takeover would amount to 130 million euros, of which 80 million would be paid partly in subsidy and partly in the form of a loan directly by the State.
But for this plan to be viable and suitable for court on Friday, several magazine publishers must join the project. Indeed, the resized cooperative proposed by the daily newspapers could not reach equilibrium without also distributing a few magazines, the volume of sales to the number of daily newspapers having dropped sharply in recent years.
After Prisma ( Gala , Here , Current Woman ...) and Reworld Media ( Grazia , Closer , Auto Plus ) have decided to leave the negotiating table, other publishers must therefore decide in the coming days. Several would be ready, notably Bayard ( Astrapi , J'aime lire , Notre Temps ...) and Le canard enchaîné . But another heavyweight, CMI ( Marianne , Elle , Télé 7 Jours ) is still hesitant.
Marianne's boss , Frédérick Cassegrain, chairs the magazine cooperative. Its plan to bring together Presstalis and its only competitor, the MLP, was not retained. But he doesn't close the door. "CMI will look at whether or not to join the daily newspapers' project," says the editor, who stresses that "magazine groups will be able to join in part or in whole" , that is to say, place certain titles with Presstalis and others at MLP. “We will have to be vigilant about the level of the scales proposed by Presstalis, obtain the guarantee that our receivables (turnover blocked to support the treasury of Presstalis) will be returned to us and that Arcep can control and analyze the flows to know who What is really paying, ” adds Frédérick Cassegrain.
Industrial and social risk
Presstalis management supports the daily papers' proposal, which it describes as "realistic" . The Ciri (Interministerial Committee for Industrial Restructuring), which framed the discussions, must still specify to what extent it will support the distributor, who is going through his third major crisis in less than ten years.
Presstalis called on all publishers Monday evening "to actively participate in the discussions of the coming days to finalize an enriched and structuring offer for the sector". For its part, the daily newspapers' cooperative underlines "the risk that the prospect of a judicial liquidation of Presstalis is a harbinger of an industrial and social catastrophe, with very heavy damage for the entire sector". The editors of daily newspapers call on the editors of magazines "to make a full commitment to allow that, on the basis of (their) offer, be finalized without delay a project gaining the support of the trade union organizations."