2023-05-22 19:11:30
Towards a renegotiation of Casino’s debt to ensure the group’s future? The distributor from Saint-Etienne, whose title was suspended at the opening of the Paris Stock Exchange on Tuesday May 23, has given itself until 5 p.m. to launch a possible conciliation procedure with its creditors.
At 9 a.m., Casino asked Euronext to suspend the listing of its shares “awaiting the publication of a press release and until further notice”according to a press release published on the website of the stock market operator.
According to the daily Le Figarothe group’s board of directors, which met on Monday evening, decided to request a conciliation procedure which has yet to be validated by the commercial court.
Mutual agreement procedure
For the rating agencies S & P and Fitch, the suspense is low: they anticipate a debt restructuring to the detriment of creditors and have lowered the group’s rating accordingly. The distributor, listed on the stock exchange, itself warned the markets in April that it was in the process of studying the possibility of opening a conciliation procedure, setting itself as a deadline initially May 19, before shifting it from a few days, to May 23.
The conciliation procedure is an amicable procedure placed under the aegis of the commercial court, which should allow the company in difficulty to reach an agreement with its main creditors. The group of private nursing homes Orpea benefited from it in the course of 2022.
Casino, which employs more than 50,000 people in France and 200,000 worldwide under many brands, including Monoprix or Franprix, has been struggling for years to get out of debt, so far without success. Its debt still reached 6.4 billion euros at the end of 2022 (including 4.5 billion on its activity in France), to which are added more than three billion for the parent company of the group, Rallye.
lusts
This last entity, as well as the cascade of holding companies through which the CEO of Casino Jean-Charles Naouri holds control of the distributor, had benefited in May 2019 from a placement in safeguard procedure. Rallye, parent company of Casino, also announced on Monday evening that it had obtained the opening of a conciliation procedure with its creditors with the Paris Commercial Court, after an initial amicable procedure launched in April and which did not did not succeed.
This financial situation weighs on Casino’s commercial activity, leaving it with less investment capacity than the competition in stores or in prices. The group, powerful in Île-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Rhône-Alpes, nevertheless arouses envy.
“Casino has the best network in France, the best formats (…) with exceptional locations”, praised in an interview with several media, mid-May, the general manager of Teract (Gamm Vert, Jardiland, Boulangeries Louise, etc.) Moez-Alexandre Zouari. The one who is also a major franchisee of the Casino group in Île-de-France has been negotiating for several months to integrate the French activity of the struggling distributor to Teract, whose majority shareholder is the agrifood giant InVivo.
Loss of control
At the end of April, the third supermarket chain in France, Intermarché, joined the discussions supposed to be completed by the end of May. But another offer has emerged, led by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, already a 10% shareholder in Casino, who on April 24 proposed to inject 750 million euros into the group via a reserved capital increase of more than one billion euros in total.
These offers could result in the loss of control of Casino for Jean-Charles Naouri, the largest shareholder since 1992 and CEO since 2005. Aged 74, he has however recently modified the statutes of Rallye to push back the age limit for his presidency from 75 to 78 years old.
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