Veolia to exit transport business

CIE · 07-12-2011 3:59am #1

Bloomberg News

They're planning to sell off their Transdev division, as part of an overall sale of €5 billion in assets to cut debt. They've already had their credit rating downgraded by Fitch after their second round of profit forecast cuts. Don't know what that means for Luas in the future.

antoinolachtnai · 07-12-2011 8:22am

Nothing. This has been on the cards for a while. Veolia is mainly an environmental business, not a transport business. They only really ended up running the Lias contract by accident. They never bid for it.

markpb · 07-12-2011 9:12am

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

They only really ended up running the Lias contract by accident. They never bid for it.

What happened?

Cookie_Monster · 07-12-2011 9:17am

So how will it affect Luas in the sense, will whoever buys the transport division off the automatically get it or will it be re-bid?

markpb · 07-12-2011 9:24am

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

So how will it affect Luas in the sense, will whoever buys the transport division off the automatically get it or will it be re-bid?

I presume there'll be no impact. Whoever buys Transdev will continue operating the existing contract. Change of corporate ownership should have no impact at all.

antoinolachtnai · 07-12-2011 10:04am

Connex won the contract, the parent went wallop and Veolia bought it, if I remember correctly.

monument · 07-12-2011 10:54am

Not exactly the same thing, but did they not win it the second time around when the contract came up for renewal?

BuffyBot · 07-12-2011 11:09am

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

Connex won the contract, the parent went wallop and Veolia bought it, if I remember correctly.

Not quite. Connex was always part of the company. It was just renamed Veolia Transport. They didn't get the Luas by accident

dowlingm · 07-12-2011 7:29pm

The French division was bought by the French equivalent of the NPRF. Ireland gave away its NRPF for a bunch of worthless Irish bank share certificates.