It certainly couldn't be enough the London meeting of Tim's CEO, Amos Genish, with Elliott representatives to neutralize the plan of attack of the american activist fund which targeted the telephone company and above all the role of the majority shareholder Vivendi in order to transform Tim into a public company.
This is why, fully understanding the danger of the Elliott plan, Vivendi is consulting the cream of law firms to quickly mount the counteroffensive which is essentially based on two points and which aims to gain time to implement a more complex strategy. The idea of the French is to dismiss Tim's board of directors to deprive the meeting of April 24 and neutralize the alternative list of candidates for the board that Elliott is preparing to place at the top of the Italian group professionals capable of countering Vivendi's moves in the telephone company.
Telecom is still suffering on the stock market today – down more than 2% – after last week's boom and just in the last few hours communicated to the unions its intention to resort to the extraordinary redundancy fund for the restructuring redundancies. Request momentarily refused by the acronyms who asked (and obtained) a few weeks to consider the alternatives.
Beyond the procedural skirmishes, the objectives of Elliott, which has already invested 800 million euros in the Italian telephone company, which plans to rise from 4,9 to 9,9% and to find alliances in other international funds (from Norges to BlackRock), there are mainly four:
GOVERNANCE – The cornerstone of Elliott's strategy is to progressively balance the presence of Vivendi in the capital (the French hold 23,9%) and in the new board in order to transform Tim from a company run by a single entity (Vivendi) to a real contestable public company.
NET - Elliott is not satisfied with just the corporate separation of the Telecom network, initiated by Genish, but is aiming for a real one network spin-off itself in order to create a completely independent and possibly listed company, the majority of which could be entrusted to Cdp and which would represent the prerequisite for unifying the networks with Open Fiber.
DIVIDEND – Elliott also advocates immediate return to distribution of the dividend by Tim, which, in the opinion of the activist fund, should start immediately and be approved in the meeting at the end of April (if it really takes place that day).
CONVERSION – Another crucial point of the Elliott plan is the conversion of savings shares into ordinary shares, an idea which in the past had already been put forward by Vivendi itself which, however, had not found the necessary consensus in last year's meeting. Today the parties could reverse, in the sense that Vivendi, if it ends up in the minority, could act as a blocking minority to prevent the conversion wanted by Elliott.
