Europe

Altice France, the European telecom giant led by billionaire Patrick Drahi, has struck a global debt deal with investors holding more than $25 billion in bonds and loans, one of the largest of a new breed of restructuring transactions, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The deal, which includes most of Altice’s creditors, could be the largest liability-management exercise for a European business to date.

Castle Water Ltd. and KKR & Co. have been invited to provide more detail on their bids as the process for owning the debt-laden utility Thames Water progresses, Bloomberg News reported. The US alternative asset manager and water firm Castle have been asked to submit revised bids this week. Both have previously put forward non-binding offers to inject around £4 billion ($5.1 billion) into Thames Water to help turn around the utility. The offer from infrastructure investor Covalis Capital, who is also a junior creditor of Thames, is currently less favored by Thames Water.

The National Asset Management Agency (Nama), the state’s ‘bad bank’, appears to have got the best available price for a Northern Ireland portfolio of loans known as Project Eagle, a seven-year investigation has found, the Irish Independent reported. Nama had previously been criticised by the Comptroller & Auditor General for making a loss of £162m (€195m) from selling assets in Northern Ireland, and for the way it handled the sale. This prompted the Irish government to set up a commission of inquiry in 2017, which reported last October after several extensions.

UniCredit has asked German antitrust authorities to approve its move to take a substantial stake in Commerzbank, another key hurdle for the Italian bank to overcome as it pursues a possible takeover of the German lender, Reuters reported. UniCredit has built a web of financial transactions to secure a Commerzbank stake of just under 30%, putting it on the cusp of a full-blown takeover of one of the most important lenders to Germany's small and medium-sized Mittelstand companies.

Creditors of Austrian motorbike maker KTM AG approved a restructuring plan that will write off 70% of the company’s debt and resume production with the help of new investments, Bloomberg News reported. KTM will need to secure €548 million ($575 million) of funding by May 23 to pay creditors, according to the plan that was approved on Tuesday by a majority of creditors. An extended circle of shareholders will provide additional financing to resume production, the company’s parent, Pierer Mobility, said in a statement. Share of Pierer Mobility rallied 11% in Zurich after the announcement.

U.S. carmaker Tesla will acquire parts of the insolvent German high-tech parts maker Manz AG , including more than 300 employees at its site in Reutlingen city in the southwest, the German company said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The deal marks a wider presence by Tesla in Germany, where it runs a manufacturing site near Berlin, even after CEO Elon Musk endorsed the far-right party AfD, which mainstream parties have refused to work with due to its extreme positions. Tesla sold almost 60% fewer cars in Germany in January than a year earlier, as the U.S.

Germany’s economy contracted in the final quarter of 2024, the country’s statistics agency confirmed Tuesday, underlining the scale of the challenge for the next German government to turn around its economic fortunes, the Wall Street Journal reported. Europe’s largest economy shrank 0.2% in the three months to the end of December, matching a prior estimate published in January, the agency Destatis said. The country’s economy contracted for a second year in a row in 2024, also by 0.2%.