RIYADH (AFP) - Saudi billionaire Prince Al-Walid bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz is in talks with Euro Disney, in which he is a major shareholder and which expects its losses to deepen this year, his spokesman said.
"We're in talks right now," Amjad Shacker told AFP. "Obviously, the company is not doing as well as expected, so the talks would have to be about how it would improve."
But Shacker declined to say if the Saudi tycoon was considering a rescue plan for the operator of the Disneyland Resort Paris theme park, insisting it would be "premature to jump to conclusions."
"We're not commenting on the talks," he said, when pressed to say whether Prince Al-Walid, who bailed out Euro Disney in exchange for a 24 percent stake in 1994, would pump more funds into the company or was trying to broker a deal with creditor banks.
The prince, a nephew of King Fahd whose fortune is put at 20 billion dollars, reduced his stake in Euro Disney to 17 percent within the past two years "as part of the deal we had with them," Shacker said.
Euro Disney signaled on Monday that losses were likely to deepen in the 2002-2003 financial year.
The company was reacting to a report in the French newspaper Le Parisien on Friday which said the group was heading for a net loss of 58 million euros (67.28 million dollars) from a loss of 33.1 million euros the previous year.
But it noted that any information about its performance was not fully reliable until the accounts had been audited and published.
Euro Disney said in August that, for the first time since having to restructure debt in 1994, it would be unable to respect some debt obligations in 2003 and 2004. The company said then that a fall in tourism and the economic downturn had reduced the numbers of people visiting its attractions, east of Paris.
The newspaper report had quoted a confidential report by consultants Arec, working for the Euro Disney works council representing staff, as saying the number of visitors had been scarcely more than 12.5 million in the year, or 600,000 fewer than in 2001-2002 and two million fewer than the figure forecast.
The group said the figures for the expected financial results for 2003 mentioned in the article had come from internal documents and presentations prepared by the company before the close of the 2003 financial year on September 30.
But the company said that, in common with all companies quoted on the stock exchange, Euro Disney did not publish its annual results until they had been audited.
The group is due to announce its results in November
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Sebastian Horacek alias Coasters