NEW YORK-In a public offering scheduled for late this month, Italy’s Treasury Ministry will sell its remaining 35.7 percent stake in Telecom Italia, the government agency announced Oct. 5.
The company’s profits for the first seven months of 1997 totaled more than $1 billion, largely driven by international wireline traffic and by income from its wireless telephone division, Telecom Italia Mobile S.p.A.
Telecom Italia’s privatization is the biggest undertaken in Italy, which is eager to become the first of the European Union nations to adopt the euro currency in January 1999.
“This will be the biggest share offering ever carried out in Europe on the secondary market,” said Mario Draghi, Treasury director general. He placed the value involved at $9.5 billion.
Of the shares to be offered, 2.9 percent will be earmarked for investors that have held stock in the former state-run telecommunications group for at least one year, Draghi said.
The Treasury previously had held 44.7 percent of Telecom Italia’s capital, but it recently sold 9.2 percent to a group of 14 large shareholders that include AT&T Corp. and Europe’s Unisource.
Up to 15 percent of the public offering, or 225 million shares, will be set aside for banks to buy at the original offer price in the event of unusually high demand for the securities, Treasury said. Another 220 million of the shares will be offered publicly in the United States and Canada.
The maximum price per share is to be set Oct. 18 and made public the next day. The definitive, or actual, share price will be announced Oct. 26.
