All that for this !
After having put all of Paris business in turmoil for the past two weeks, Bertelsmann finally gave up selling M 6 on Monday, according to information from Le Point confirmed by a press release.
The German media giant considered that the constraints weighing on the operation were too numerous for it to be completed before May 5, 2023, the date of reattribution of the authorization to broadcast M 6. French law then prohibits any resale of the channel for five years in the name of the fight against TV "frequency trafficking".
“The schedule is extremely tight,” warned Roch-Olivier Maistre, head of Arcom, the audiovisual regulatory authority, last week.
Same warning from Benoît Cœuré, president of the Competition Authority, who spoke of a “very tight” deadline.
And for good reason.
If he wanted to sell his lucrative audiovisual subsidiary, Bertelsmann would have had to obtain in just a few weeks the green light from an antitrust authority – French or European depending on the profile of the buyer selected – then the agreement of Arcom (formerly THAT'S IT).
When we know that the TF 1-M 6 merger project was studied by the public authorities for nearly sixteen months, before failing, the game promised to be very risky for the firm.
Too.
Nicolas de Tavernost welcomes it
Aware of the difficulties, Thomas Rabe, the boss of Bertelsmann, had from the start of this second sale of M 6 mentioned the hypothesis of an indefinite postponement of the operation.
On September 22, commenting on the failure of the merger with TF 1, he announced to the Financial Times to carry out a simple “market test”.
The goal: to ensure the attractiveness of the Six to potential buyers, and above all to check the feasibility of the operation in this constrained timing.
"It is on the basis of the test that we will decide whether to sell or not," he said, not wishing to suffer a setback a second time.
Read alsoTF1 and M6 cancel their merger: the long soap opera of a marriage that will never take place
Bertelsmann immediately received three attractive offers.
The first came from Xavier Niel, associated with Silvio Berlusconi's MediaForEurope group.
A trio of businessmen formed by Stéphane Courbit, boss of the production giant Banijay, Rodolphe Saadé (CMA-CGM), and Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière (Fimalac) also came forward, as did Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky , which notably publishes the newspapers Marianne and Elle.
Not enough to convince the Germans to embark on a transfer that promises to be high risk.
In any case, Bertelsmann's retreat does not seem to displease Nicolas de Tavernost.
At 72, the indestructible boss of M 6 welcomes the continuation of the adventure with his shareholder for 35 years.
“We look forward to continuing together (…) to meet the challenges of our profession,” he wrote on Twitter on Monday evening.
