Patrick Drahi’s audacious raid on BT

Patrick Drahi, the Israeli-French billionaire, has stealthily become the biggest shareholder in the British telecoms firm, seeking to unleash its true value. But his record might well make BT nervous.

Patrick Drahi
(Image credit: © POL EMILE/SIPA/Shutterstock)

When news flashed through the City last week that a company run by Patrick Drahi had stealthily become the biggest shareholder in BT, the response from Brits outside the industry was: who? No longer, says the London Evening Standard. The audacious £2.2bn share raid on Britain’s biggest telecoms company has put the “extremely private” Israeli-French billionaire, and his company Altice, “firmly in the spotlight” – as well as in the driving seat at BT.

Having set up Altice in 2001 as a holding company to invest in cable and mobile operators, Drahi, 57, has spent the past 20 years building up one of the world’s biggest telecoms outfits (and a near $12bn personal fortune) via a series of aggressive and cannily leveraged deals. But he is arguably best known for his extracurricular activities as an art lover, says The Times. Having amassed a collection featuring a bevy of works by Picasso and Matisse, he stunned the art world in 2019 by paying an “eye-watering” $3.7bn to take underperforming 275-year-old auction house Sotheby’s private – explaining that the trophy purchase was an “investment for my family”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.