BarcelonaThe leverage that should allow Barça to carry out the sports operations that remain pending before the end of the transfer market on September 1st – sign Marcos Alonso, Iñaki Peña and Alejandro Balde and incorporate Joao Cancelo – will lead to the IPO of Barça Media, the subsidiary that the Barcelona club has created to encompass all audiovisual, digital ande-sports and listed on the stock market through Nasdaq, the US technology market. To do this, Joan Laporta’s board of directors has moved the headquarters of Barça Media to the Netherlands (the cash will remain in Spain), according to the documentation it has registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC ), who advanced The country and to which the ARA also had access.
“In the financial world, when you do international operations, no one thinks of looking for them in Spain. You go to efficient places like Luxembourg or the Netherlands,” assures this newspaper David Valero Carreras, economist expert in finance from the football And he adds: “The Netherlands brings you three advantages: flexibility in structures, a peculiar taxation (you can come to an agreement with the state on the percentage of taxes to pay) and opacity (you can avoid saying what they are some of the shareholders participating in the operation)”. In fact, there is already a Cypriot investor in the operation whose identity is not known.
This newspaper has asked official sources of the Barça club for the reasons for the choice of the Netherlands and the answer has been that what is related “to Barça Media and its business structure will be explained by the club in full detail in due course when everything is closed and, obviously, any decision that affects the industrial dimension of Barça will have to be ratified by the assembly”.
The way in which Barça has chosen to list on the stock market is a SPAC (listed company with the purpose of acquisition) owned by Mountain Partners. As Valero Carreras explains, a SPAC “is a company created without a business that buys a company (in this case, Barça Media) to take it public.” Before the end of the year, the operation of this SPAC is expected to be closed. The contract with Barça is for 20 years (until 2043) and can be automatically extended for another 20 years.
With this operation, Barça gains liquidity in the short term
But why has Barça decided to go public with Barça Media? What does it gain? “Barça will cede part of its business in exchange for money right from the start for something that today is smoke because there are a lot of uncertainties,” answers Valero Carreras. As ARA explained when Barça signed the operation on August 11, one of the key pieces of the operation is Thomas Middelhoff (Düsseldorf, 1953), an experienced German business manager known as Big T who had to start over after he was sentenced to three years in prison in 2014 for tax fraud and embezzlement during his time at the head of the Arcandor conglomerate. Middelhoff is the new sales director of the business division that Barça wants to take to the American stock market so that its digital, audiovisual and electronic sports business will be valued at around 900 million euros. “Right now, it’s a fairly esoteric assessment,” says Valero Carreras.
On the other hand, Alexander Hornung will be the financial director of Barça Media from his position at Mountain Partners, the fund which, as reported by the Barcelona institution, must help it “access specific financing in new markets of American capital that accelerate initiatives in the digital sector and be able to spread content to new audiences in strategic markets”. The president of this business transition will be Albert Bagó, head of strategy for Barça trained at UPC and Iese.
The main shareholder of the SPAC is its promoter, Cornelius Bosch, co-founder of Mountain Partners, with 17.6% through various companies. In addition, there are four active Wall Street funds that share other parts of the pie: Saba Capital Management (14%), Glazer Capital (13.9%), Highbridge Capital Management (11.5%) and Calamos Investment Trust ( 11.1%).
2023-08-30 05:45:52
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