Valentia may dump O'Reilly

SkepticOne

According to several London-based finance houses associated with the deal, Valentia representatives indicated last week that the consortium had provisional plans to remove O'Reilly if the tanaiste, Mary Harney, objected to his involvement on competition grounds.

Story in Sunday Times.

However one suggestion does not seem to make sense:

It is understood that one of the contingency plans drawn up by Valentia would see O'Reilly retain this stake but lose voting rights.

This, of course would not make much difference. He would still have a financial stake in Eircom/Valentia and at the same time power over Independent News and Media and Chorus. Is he likely to direct Chorus to compete agressively with Eircom?

chernobyl

I think it will a great differece.
When i have heard him speak, he completely lies about Eircom competitive stance or the lack thereof, and this should give a small glimpse of hope to see eircom broaden their competitve nature but this is subjective to who replaces him.

P R O F A N I T Y

Figured as such, his chorus connection are a liability,

SkepticOne

If they dump him, it has to be complete removal. No financial interest in Eircom should be allowed. It is not his power over Eircom that is the problem, it is power over Chorus and the newspapers. If he has a significant financial stake in Eircom, he is unlikely to publish critical articles about Eircom's services and nor is he likely to compete with Eircom through Chorus.

These "London-based finance houses" are twisting things around. O'Reilly may not have much of a stake in Eircom (4%) but it is significant from O'Reillys personal point of view. It is many tens of millions. Is he going to put this at risk by being competing with Eircom? Is he going to publish anything but praise in his newspapers?

zenith

ohpleaseohplease let them dump him ... in the Liffey hopefully.

Tony O, the great man that he is - the captain of industry, friend of the great and the good, bean baron - has been abusing his dominant position in the media for years.

Harney knows this. I think she'll do the right thing.

b20uvkft6m5xwg

Yeh Hopefully our Mary will do the right thing:)

P R O F A N I T Y

more likely is he will drop his chorus interests

zenith

He's already attempting to sell Chorus, and so is the other partner, Liberty Media, so I doubt if anybody's going to buy into such a sucky company -- however, investment in Eircom could make that company not so sucky, so I'd imangine that he'll hold on to it so that he can hold his head up in front of the wife, and be allowed out for pints with his rugby buddies on a Saturday night.

Just my 2€

dahamsta

Personally speaking, his Chorus interests don't bother me. Chorus is a non-entity in the comms market, and frankly anyone who uses them is a loony (with the possible exception of people using PowerNet, because there's simply no alternative). It's his media interests that bother me. Media and delivery shouldn't mix, period. AOLTimeWarner should never have been allowed, and TOR shouldn't be allowed a shareholding in Eircom for the same reason.

adam

SkepticOne

I think O'Reilly's interest in Chorus is also important. Although Chorus can be dismissed as a rubbish company (alledgedly), PowerNet is one of the few products that directly competes with Eircom. With O'Reilly's financial stake in Eircom (ignoring any chairmanship or voting rights in Eircom), the chances of Powernet being deployed outside Limerick go from slim to none. It was slim to start with because for the last year and a half, O'Reilly has been publically investing, not in Chorus, but in a bid for ownership of Eircom. O'Reilly obviously never had much faith in the Chorus. It is a non-entity in the comms market partly for this reason. Nevertheless, Chorus does represent a potential threat to Eircom in the form of powernet and for this reason, in addition to being a media baron and Irish face, made him attractive to the consortium. O'Reilly's large financial stake in Eircom ensures that Chorus will never be an actual threat. Having secured the bid, Valentia no longer need an 'Irish Face', but O'Reilly's financial stake, given his other ownerships, make him very attractive.

I know people will say that Chorus are crap and could never compete with Eircom anyway. But the PowerNet service seems good from reports and is far cheaper than what Eircom are planning. With the right investment it could be highly successfull. Definately not going to happen now. I expect, though that they will continue to put out reports and rumours that they are planning to deploy in Cork and Dublin in order to keep competition issues off their back.

dahamsta

Just to follow up on that topic (I still don't care about Chorus, they're quite possibly the worst company in the country), I was told in no uncertain terms by a senior Chorus sales representative that the rollout of PowerNet in Cork was delayed for no reason other than Tony O'Reilly's involvement with Valentia. She said "the equipment has been put in a shed until the Eircom takeover is completed".

I'm not making this up. I was shocked and stunned when she said it, but say it she did.

adam

P R O F A N I T Y

i believe it to, you can bet that it wont be wiped out if everything goes ahead. i thing you will see another ntl job

SkepticOne

Originally posted by dahamsta
Just to follow up on that topic (I still don't care about Chorus, they're quite possibly the worst company in the country), I was told in no uncertain terms by a senior Chorus sales representative that the rollout of PowerNet in Cork was delayed for no reason other than Tony O'Reilly's involvement with Valentia. She said "the equipment has been put in a shed until the Eircom takeover is completed".

That is precisely my point. I don't care about Chorus either. As far as I am concerned, Chorus are a company that provide intermittant retransmission of British channels and a few cheap rubbish channels in certain regions of Ireland. People put up with them because they don't want to be limited to RTE and there is no other choice for certain Brit channels. All I care about is their Powernet product - a direct competitor to ADSL and threat to Eircom's "last mile" wholesale monopoly. As you point out, it is this that is at risk with O'Reilly's stake (even if it is only financial) in Eircom.

SkepticOne

O'Reilly gives assurance over dealings with Chorus

IR ANTHONY O'REILLY has given a personal assurance to Mary Harney, the tanaiste, that he will avoid any meetings of the boards of Eircom and Independent News & Media which deal with the cable company, Chorus, writes Tom McEnaney.

Yeah right.