Wind suffers another blow

Greek mobile operator Wind Hellas has begun talks with creditors amid concerns over its falling revenues.
Wind Hellas has reportedly retained Morgan Stanley and White & Case as its financial and legal advisers, having completed a controversial…

Greek mobile operator Wind Hellas has begun talks with creditors amid concerns over its falling revenues.

Wind Hellas has reportedly retained Morgan Stanley and White & Case as its financial and legal advisers, having completed a controversial restructuring deal late last year, in which the interests of junior lenders were written off.

Now, following the implosion of the Greek economy, the operator has admitted to being strongly affected by the government’s response, which has seen spending cuts and tax increases at the heart of its attempts to reduce deficits.

Wind Hellas’s EBITDA for the two months of April and May 2010 fell 54% to E25.2m from the same period in 2009.

According to Bloomberg, the operator is due to pay E17.5m of interest on a bank loan by the end of June and a E23m bond payment by July 25 but has just E35m in available cash.

In 2009 Wind Hellas’s parent Weather Investments managed to restructure E3.2bn of company debt and injected E125m of fresh equity into the business. However, at that stage Wind Hellas remained highly leveraged at about 5.8x 2009’s projected EBITDA of E320m. There was also E1.2bn of debt to be refinanced by 2012.