INM: New O’Brien plan rejected
The billionaire businessman lashed out at the refusal of INM to accept his initial offer of €100m restructuring of the company.
Last night, a spokesperson for INM confirmed the second offer: “A bondholder committee established to negotiate terms with INM has unanimously rejected a revised proposal made to the committee by Denis O’Brien. The committee has confirmed its decision to Denis O’Brien, to INM and to the company’s banks.”
Mr O’Brien was speaking in Galway at a media conference to mark the centenary of the Connacht Tribune newspaper. He said nobody else was offering to invest in the group.
“I think if I was John Smith and I offered to invest €100m into INM, I think there would have been a different response. Merril Lynch have tried to raise money, Goldman Sachs, Davy’s – all the major investment banks have tried to raise cash for the company. So, our proposal, we thought, was a very strong proposal. It gave the company cash to sort itself out, to bring down bank debt, but also to have enough money to continue to run the business properly and to actually refloat it,” he said.
Mr O’Brien said that if the company had listened to him four years ago “we would not be in the mess they’re in at the moment”, but he declined to confirm he went back to the bondholders with a revised offer.
Referring to the losses he has sustained through the INM investment – estimated to be as high as €500 million – Mr O’Brien said: “Investments are like a portfolio, some investments you win, and I’ve been fortunate to have a few of them.”
Mr O’Brien added: “I decided to diversify into a newspaper group at a time INM had pretty good diversified assets. It was a good dividend paying stock. So you know there was an income. I thought that basically that company will move with the times. That INM would adjust to the times and the internet. That they would get out of newspapers that they would never be able to make a success of, like the London Independent, and that the business would evolve and keep growing and diversify its revenue base.”
