dj eu clears antin ip to buy euroports , page-11

AC.

The Powerco sale was simply to allow them to meet immediate and pending commitments. If they hadn't had sold this, would have been big trouble with the corporate debt. This sale simply bought them some time.

The 35M Euros net coming in from the partial Euroports sale simply buys them some more time. Not so hard up in the short term once the Powerco money zapped a lot of more urgent stuff. As people point out, it will be swept (and I don't think the sweep is a bad thing. It puts the mgmt on the short lead, where I think they need to be).

However (and I think we all know this) we need a truly big sale to really get Humpty Dumpty back together again. DBCT would be a start and this consistently seems to be the most saleable asset. At least the smaller asset sales has given it some time to get the sales process going.

Still, I think it needs two really big sales, or maybe 100% of DBCT, not sure. I think 100% DBCT will clear away all the debt issues, but it is not enough to deal with the preference share issues. I would rather see them do a deal to restructure the prefs rather than break the bank and sell good assets cheaply to fix the prefs problem.

In this market I think we are going to see a lot more pragmatic deals done between different classes of equity and bondholders for the good of the overall well being of the businesses in question.