O Antenna και ο Μίνως Κυριακού ενδιαφέρονται να αγοράσουν το βρετανικό Channel Five, σύμφωνα με πληροφορίες των Financial Times. Το κανάλι πωλείται από το ραδιοτηλεοπτικό κολοσσό του RTL, που στην Ελλάδα έχει τον Alpha. Η απόφαση θα ανακοινωθεί στο επόμενο 15νθήμερο.

ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ το ρεπορτάζ των FT.

Greek interest in RTL’s Five TV auction

By Ben Fenton, Chief Media Correspondent

The sale process of RTL’s UK channel Five has reached a due diligence stage with a new prospective bidder emerging, according to people familiar with the situation.

Antenna Group of Greece is working with Cyrte Investments and Talpa Media, two groups connected to the Dutch media entrepreneur John de Mol, who founded Endemol, two people with direct knowledge of the process said.

Through Endemol, of which Cyrte owns a third, Mr de Mol could bring additional programming to Five’s schedule, including the Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother formats that are about to end their 10-year run on the rival Channel 4, the people said.

Antenna and its partners join others who have expressed an interest in Five, the loss-making UK arm of RTL, a pan-European broadcaster 90 per cent owned by Bertelsmann of Germany.

Dawn Airey, Five’s chief executive, and advisers to RTL have met more than a dozen different potential buyers, but the list of those who have taken their interest beyond an initial stage is down to four or five, according to a person familiar with the list.

Two people with knowledge of the situation said that Richard Desmond, the owner of the Daily and Sunday Express Newspapers as well as other media interests, was also in the latter stages.

No announcement is expected for “a week or two”, one of the people said.

People close to the company said Five has performed better so far in 2010 than it did in 2009, when it recorded an operating loss of £10m as revenues shrank from €430m to €303m ($370m) in the worst advertising recession the UK television industry has seen.

Analysts and bankers say that RTL wants up to €200m for Five, although one potential bidder said on Tuesday that half that sum was a more likely target for indicative bids.

Antenna Group is the company of Theo Kyriakou, the 35-year-old scion of a Greek shipping family. Last year, he told the Financial Times that his sale of Antenna’s Bulgarian television asset Nova to the Modern Times Group of Sweden, had given him a warchest of up to €2bn to look at European assets, including UK companies.

In the meantime, Mr Kyriakou has bought the Serbian television interests of News Corporation, Fox Televisija, another lossmaking investment.

There have been reports of a number of other companies showing interest in Five, including ITV, Endemol itself, Time Warner and British Sky Broadcasting. One person said on Tuesday that a private equity firm was also in the latter stages of the process.

But another person who has seen the information memorandum on Five suggested that it was very difficult for private equity to make a sensible offer.

“It really doesn’t generate any cash, so it would have to be all equity and no leverage, which is a pretty horrible investment hypothesis for a P/E firm,” the person said.

“You would have to have some kind of masterplan, and the trend is not the friend of free-to-air broadcasting at the moment.”

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