French billionaire Xavier Niel has tightened his grip on Eir after a US hedge fund completed its exit from the State’s largest telecoms group, the Sunday Times reports.
The Irish Times reported last October that Mr Niel had started on a trajectory towards full ownership of Eir, as two US hedge funds began to exit their investment in the former Irish telecoms monopoly.
New documents show that Davidson Kempner sold its 8.9 per cent stake in the business in three tranches between last September and this February to the group’s ultimate holding company, Carraun Telecom.
NJJ Boru, a company controlled by Mr Niel and his company Iliad, now owns more than 70 per cent of Eir with US private equity firm Anchorage Capital.
The former State telecoms monopoly, which boasted some 1.2 million home and business connections to its network in the Republic last year, has paid out more than €2 billion in dividends to its owners since Mr Niel led a takeover in April 2018.
McKillen firm defaults on shopping centre loans
A firm controlled by Paddy McKillen defaulted on tens of millions of euro worth of loans before it ceased operations and sold its assets last year, the Business Post reports.
The directors of Frenchgate Interchange Ltd admitted in recent UK company filings that the company is “not in a position to discharge its liabilities” after years of mounting debt and is now in discussions with its lenders about its obligations.
The company is linked to the Frenchgate Shopping Centre in Doncaster in the UK, once controlled by Mr McKillen.
The Belfast-born developer, who was convicted by a court in Paris last week of being physically and verbally aggressive towards a bailiff at one of his luxury apartments, sold the shopping centre in Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group for £25.9 million last year.
Frenchgate owed some £196.3 million to its lenders at the end of 2023, the filings reveal and has “ceased operations but continues to have material obligations due on demand”, a director noted in the accounts.
State spending on private healthcare balloons
Also in the Business Post, State payments to private healthcare businesses have exploded since the advent of Sláintecare in 2017, surging by more than 700 per cent from €30 million in 2016 to nearly €250 million in 2023.
The initiative, which was meant to increase the public health system’s capacity, has instead led to a boom in payments to privately owned businesses across several areas of provision.
In its analysis of the figures, the paper reports that the State paid €107 million to the private system through the National Treatment Purchase Fund in 2023 compared with €30 million in 2016. The HSE also now buys bed capacity directly from private hospitals, valued at more than €130 million in 2023.
David Cullinane, Sinn Féin’s health spokesman, said there is a crisis of confidence in the public system, which is driving people towards private insurance. “For me, the big game changer, if we really want a public system that people can have confidence in, is to build the public-only elective hospitals,” he said.
Solar 21 gets green light for UK energy park
Beleaguered renewables investment company Solar 21 has received consent from the UK government to develop a large-scale waste-to-energy plant in Lincolnshire after a series of delays, the Sunday Independent reports.
The Irish group, which is undergoing a court-sanctioned restructuring process to pay back investors, brought the application for its North Lincolnshire Green Energy Park in 2022, but a UK government examining authority recommended that consent be withheld.
The decision has now been overruled by the British secretary of state for energy.
Solar 21 believes it can sell the park for some €119 million, the paper reports, which could help pay off some of what the group owes to investors.
