US fund makes ‘friendly’ offer for Telecom Italia

Rome: Telecom Italia (TIM) confirmed Sunday it had received a “friendly”, non-binding expression of interest by US private equity fund KKR that values the Italian operator at around 10.8 billion euros.

An emergency meeting of TIM’s board of directors was called to discuss “a possible public tender offer for the entire share capital of the company” offering an initial 0.505 euros a share, the firm said in a statement afterwards.

On Friday, TIM shares closed at around 0.35 euros.