José M. Rodríguez Silva
Updated Friday, January 19, 2024-11:40
Interview Eammon O'Hare, president of Zegona: "We will invest 3,000 million in Vodafone Spain in four years"
The Zegona
investment fund
has begun the formal authorization process to acquire Vodafone Spain by notifying the operation to the
National Markets and Competition Commission
(CNMC).
The British group hopes to take control of the company in
the first quarter of 2024
, although it must obtain the green light from the
Government
and other authorizations in
Brussels
in order to close the operation.
According to the records consulted by EL MUNDO, the request for approval before the regulatory body was sent last Tuesday, but was not made public until this Friday.
The CNMC
usually takes around a month
to approve or not an operation of this type, which, predictably, will be resolved by simple means, without requiring an in-depth analysis as it is the third player in the market and does not imply a greater concentration of the same.
Zegona
will pay 5,000 million euros
for Vodafone Spain and plans to give a radical twist to the operations that the British company has been carrying out in recent years and which has caused a gradual drop in income and loss of customers, especially in the fixed segment. .
The notification comes shortly after Brussels has denied Zegona the possibility of Orange and MásMóvil transferring customers to the operator as part of their merger, an operation that, for its part, seems increasingly close to closing and receiving the approval of the community competition authority.