Paul Coulson agrees to give up shares in Ardagh Group for €108m

Paul Coulson has agreed a deal to give up his stake in the Ardagh Group for €108m. The deal is part of a restructuring of the bottling and packaging giant that will see Coulson, along with the bondholders and shareholders, share a $300m (€257m) pay-off. Ardagh, which is based in Luxembourg and produces glass bottles and metal cans in facilities spanning Europe, the US and Africa. Ardagh Group’s customers range from Coca-Cola and Heineken to Swiss group Nestlé. However, the Group has close to €10bn of debt, which became unsustainable since the pandemic and only made more difficult to manage by inflation, soaring interest rates, and a fall in demand in the US. Mr Coulson (73) has a 36 per cent stake in the business and has been in talks for months about the current deal. Control is set to be passed to Ardagh’s unsecured bondholders as part of a debt-for-equity swap. The group’s riskiest $1.7bn of payment-in-kind bonds will be fully written off in exchange for a small minority stake in the business. Bondholders will also provide $1.5bn of new funding to the group, while a loan that Apollo Global Management provided last year will be repaid in full. Terms of the restructuring transaction are expected to be finalised this week but will require 90pc of creditors to sign up to avoid a slower confirmation process overseen by a court, probably in the UK. An agreement backed by 75pc of a lender class can be pushed through by the High Court in London. Coulson’s investment in Ardagh began when his airline leasing business in the 1990s ran into trouble. After winning a multimillion-dollar payout from the investment bank that advised on an acquisition that crippled his company, Coulson used the cash to acquire a stake in a small Dublin-based bottling company. Ardagh Group’s customers range from Coca-Cola and Heineken to Swiss group Nestlé. Photograph: Sam Boal / RollingNews.ie A series of debt-fuelled acquisitions over the next two decades transformed the business into one of the world’s biggest producers of glass and metal drinks containers. In 2021, his fortune was estimated to be $2.8 bn, ranking him the tenth richest person in the country. Photo: Paul Coulson. Photo: Gareth Chaney/© RollingNews.ie

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