Eircom group to exit examinership

The Eircom group which has been in protective examiner ship for the past few weeks (53 days as of yesterday) has been given permission to exit it on June 11th next following a deal between debtors and the company approved by Mr Justice Peter Kelly of the High Court.

The largest examiner ship in the history of the state will see the €4billion in debt being reduced to €2.35billion through debt and organisational restructuring as well as the company’s senior lenders becoming shareholders. This will mean job losses through 1000 voluntary redundancies but it should secure the future of the company (although we have been here before).

Eircom is still a strategic asset to the state as it controls most of the physical communications network and is still the dominant player out side the major centres. Hopefully there will be now room for investment in the network so sorely missed since the company went public in 1999. Eircom sold their eircell mobile network to Vodafone in 2000 but then they bought Meteor in 2005 and then setup emobile (operating on the infrastructure of the Meteor network) in 2010.