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Bankers have sounded out potential buyers for a minority stake in Sotheby’s as its owner Patrick Drahi comes under pressure to sell assets at his indebted telecoms group Altice.
Those approached included European billionaires and the Qatar Investment Authority, said two people with knowledge of the contacts. The QIA held unfruitful talks with Drahi a year ago about buying a Sotheby’s stake via a potential capital increase, another person directly in the know said.
However, people close to Drahi said the Franco-Israeli billionaire was reluctant to offload Sotheby’s, which he has owned since 2019 through his personal holding company. The bankers’ approaches were informal and a deal was not imminent, they cautioned.
“Sotheby’s is a unique asset that has regularly attracted interest from investors interested in taking a minority stake,” said one of the people.
The Hamas attacks on Israel may also have complicated a potential sale to Qatar, a second person familiar with his thinking said. Drahi is a prominent figure in Israel, where he owns a television news channel and a telecoms operator, and Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political office since 2012 while pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into Gaza.
The Sotheby’s pitch came after Drahi announced in August that Altice was looking to sell assets to cut its $60bn debt mountain racked up during years of frenetic acquisitions in France, the US, Portugal and Israel.
Bondholders have grown worried after Drahi’s right-hand man Armando Pereira was arrested in Portugal in July over allegations of corrupt procurement practices at Altice. Drahi has said he was “shocked” by the investigation into Pereira and Altice has pledged to clean up its internal practices.
The telco entrepreneur has asked banks including Lazard and Morgan Stanley to explore asset sales. These include Meo, the Portuguese operator at the centre of the Pereira corruption case, a stake in French mobile operator SFR and online advertising business Teads, according to people briefed on the process. Initial bids are expected in the coming weeks.
In November, Altice struck a deal to sell a majority stake in its data centre business in France, valued at €764mn, to a Morgan Stanley infrastructure fund.
Drahi bought London-based Sotheby’s in 2019 for $3.7bn via his family office, not Altice. In 2022, its revenue rose 8 per cent to $1.4bn compared with a year earlier, although the company posted a net loss of about $515,000, according to accounts published in Luxembourg.
Sotheby’s accounts also showed that it paid out more than $26mn to Drahi’s main Luxembourg investment vehicle in 2021 and 2022 for “strategic advisory and other executive-level services”.
Qatar has been interested in auction houses in the past. In 2010, the then emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, told the Financial Times that he would be interested in bidding for Sotheby’s rival, Christie’s, which is owned by the Pinault family.
Various members of Qatar’s ruling family have become some of the world’s most active art collectors — and sought-after clients for auction houses. Gas-rich Qatar boasts a collection shown across a broad range of museums, from modern art to Islamic antiquities, overseen by the emir’s sister, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad al-Thani.
Seeking to diversify away from hydrocarbons, Doha is hunting for assets to complement its existing portfolio, which includes Harrods department store and the Shard tower in London.
QIA and a spokesman for Drahi declined to comment.
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