Billionaire Drahi Pays Up in Record Junk Sale: Corporate Finance

Billionaire Patrick Drahi is offering concessions to win over U.S. investors as he finances the acquisition of Vivendi SA’s French phone unit with the world’s biggest junk bond offering.

As part of about $23 billion of funding in euro and dollar bonds and loans to buy SFR, Drahi's Altice SA is paying 7.75 percent in interest on $2.9 billion of eight-year junk notes with a preliminary B rating from Standard & Poor’s. That's more than the average 5.93 percent for similarly graded debt securities due in about eight years in the Bloomberg High-Yield Corporate Bond Index.