The waters of French retail are getting more and more agitated. To the continuous alarms on the increase of the prices and the policies undertaken in order to manage the situation add the bad news in arrival from giant six supermarkets like Casino, the French chain at risk of default that has decided to sell its 313 hypermarkets and supermarkets. The operation ended in these hours: the more than 300 supermarkets were sold to the consortium led by the Czech entrepreneur Daniel Kretinsky who obtained the approval of the European Union antitrust to take control of the French Casino.

The situation worries the unions, who said they fear that Casino can be dismantled with the sale of stores: for this reason they decided to call an all-out strike from today, january 9, until february 5. The strike is added to the abstention decided in recent days for the same reason. The current shareholders will be massively diluted under a restructuring agreement that will put an end to the thirty-year reign of the 74 year old Jean-Charles Naouri, who controls Casino through his publicly traded holding company Rallye.

The Kretinsky consortium will own and control 53.7% of Casino’s share capital under an agreement to inject €1.2 billion of new funds into the supermarket chain and reduce debt by 6,1 billion Euros. The plan requires further regulatory approvals, including the authorisation of the French Ministry of Finance on foreign investment rules and a derogation by the stock market regulator to avoid the initiation of a formal public acquisition procedure.

Now, Casino’s shareholders and creditors have until january 11 to approve an accelerated protection procedure that the supermarket chain itself initiated in October 2023 to help finalise the debt restructuring agreement. In December the procedure was extended by two months until 25 february.

All this happens despite the fact that on 18 December Casino declared that it had started exclusive negotiations for the sale of all its large stores in France to rivals Les Mousquetaires and Auchan Retail.