LONDON - The fight for Vivendi’s cellular phone unit just keeps getting stranger.
Vivendi, a French media conglomerate, said late Wednesday that it had blocked an attempt by a shareholder activist group to access documents related to the sale of SFR, its mobile phone unit.
Colette Neuville, who heads an association representing the rights of minority shareholders, sent a bailiff to Vivendi’s offices on Wednesday in hopes of accessing documents related to the continuing sale negotiations, Vivendi said, adding that the bailiff had been denied access.
“After considering the extravagant nature of this procedure, Vivendi’s lawyers have decided to oppose this intrusion and will apply to a judge for a summary judgment,†the company said in a statement.
Last month, Vivendi entered into a three-week exclusive negotiation period with Altice, a cable and mobile service provider based in Luxembourg, for SFR after it weighed earlier bids from Altice and Bouygues. The exclusive window runs through Friday.
But, Bouygues, which owns Bouygues Telecom, the third-largest French mobile operator after Orange and SFT, has refused to go away. It increased its bid on March 20 and has since said that both its revised bid and its original bid, in which it would hold a smaller percentage of SFR’s stock, remained valid.
Bouygues would reshape the French telecommunications landscape by combining two of the four largest mobile providers. The company has committed to pay a breakup fee of 500 million euros, or about $690 million, if regulators were to reject the deal or impose untenable conditions on the transaction.
The attempt to access sale documents came as the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, the French regulator of financial markets, had called for more transparency in the negotiations, including in disclosing potential breakup fees.
Last week, the French regulator said that Altice, Vivendi and Bouygues, as public companies, were obligated to provide “exact, precise and sincere†information to the market, even if SFR, a nonlisted company, was not subject to tender offer rules in France.
The bidding war has pitted Martin Bouygues, the billionaire who runs the diversified industrial group that bears his name, against the French entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, who since 2002 has built Altice into a global operation with cable and cellphone assets in Europe and the Caribbean.
The sale of SFR is part of Vivendi’s plan to increase its capital reserves and to expand its existing media assets, like the pay-television provider Canal Plus. Vivendi had previously considered its own initial public offering for SFR.
On March 14, Vivendi said that Altice had offered to pay €11.75 billion and to give Vivendi a 32 percent stake in Altice’s Numericable, which would be combined with SFR. It also provided Vivendi with predetermined exit conditions, Vivendi said.
A week later, Bouygues said that it had increased the cash portion of its offer by €1.85 billion, to €13.15 billion. The new offer, if accepted, would give Bouygues a 67 percent stake in SFR.
