- Title: VENEZUELA: Opposition TV channel says accepts buyout offer
- Date: 12th March 2013
- Summary: CARACAS, VENEZUELA (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF A GLOBOVISION NEWSCASTER
- Embargoed: 27th March 2013 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of
- City:
- Country: Venezuela
- Topics: Business,Communications,Entertainment,Industry
- Reuters ID: LVACCS1Y16UM6W3HKX6MAZ4QZFDG
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- Story Text: Venezuelan opposition TV channel Globovision said on Monday (March 11) it had accepted a buyout offer, calling its operations financially and politically unfeasible after rows with the government and high inflation.
The sale of Globovision, the only openly anti-government media channel, will occur after an April presidential election. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
One of the station's journalists, Gladys Rodriguez, read a letter from Globovision's majority owner, Guillermo Zuloaga, to journalists.
"The deal was ready to be finalized this very week, but with the news that we have elections on April 14 and risking that the operation could collapse, I've decided to put a strong and irrevocable condition, that it go through after the elections," Rodriguez read.
Zuloaga said the group buying the channel was led by Juan Domingo Cordero, who runs an insurance company and is a former head of the local stock exchange.
In the statement he said there would be a transition period.
"There will be a transition period in which we've said we will collaborate, but the most important thing is that this gives Globovision and you the chance to stay, and grow in time," read Rodriguez.
Zuloaga said the company was suffering from a revenue shortfall, rising prices, and costly efforts to try to help the opposition win last year's presidential election.
Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles lost to Hugo Chavez in October. Chavez led a self-styled socialist revolution for 14 years in the South American OPEC nation until his death last week from cancer.
Capriles, the centrist governor of Miranda state, has since announced another bid. He will face Chavez's preferred successor, acting President Nicolas Maduro, in an election on April 14.
Roberto Giusti, a Globovision journalist for the past 10 years, said the selling of the station was not surprising.
"The outcome is natural following a process of harassment, persecution, intimidation, a financial siege, blackmailing of the stations advertisers, thatwith the need to make a decision in how the station can continue to operate; and this was impossible to do unless it was in different hands than the current owners," Giusti said.
Zuloaga had said that there were also doubts about whether it could get its concession renewed after legal tangles with the government.
"They told us that with the company in the hands of the Zuloaga family it was unviable, not only in an economic standpoint, or the business standpoint, but from a political standpoint and even from a journalistic standpoint, because all the doors to the most important sources that exist in Venezuela, which is the national government, had been shut," added Giusti.
In 2007, the government declined to renew the license for another opposition channel, RCTV, prompting widespread criticism. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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