You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Sauramps, the iconic group of five bookshops in the Montpellier area in the south of France, will file for receivership with the Montpellier commercial court after two takeover bids failed.
This only remaining bid, lodged by Matthieu de Montchalin, owner of the store L’Artmitière in Rouen and president of the French Booksellers Association (Syndicat de la Librairie Française), "did not provide the necessary elements to realise (the) project", Sauramps chairman and c.e.o. Jean-Marie Sevestre said in a statement yesterday (8th March).
The five stores of the group, which was created in 1946 and is described as an institution in the Montpellier landscape, all trade with the Sauramps prefix: Odyssé, Triangle, Au Musée and Polymômes in Montpellier, and En Cevennes in Alès. Total staff number about 140.
In a last-ditch move at the end of last month, Sevestre and the two other shareholders approached Benôit Bougerol, the other bidder for Sauramps, who owns La Maison du Livre in Rodez and Privat in Toulouse, to ask him to go ahead with an offer that they had previously rejected.
Bougerol first lodged his bid on 25th November with a deadline of one month. The deadline was extended twice before the bid was finally rejected. "I understand this was because the shareholders thought M. de Montchalin would make a better offer, but in fact he never presented a detailed written proposal, which blocked the whole procedure for the four weeks until the court wound up its ad hoc mandate on 3rd March," Bougerol told The Bookseller.
"I had offered to invest about €2.6m to revive the group," he said. Of the total, the governmental Centre National du Livre (CNL) had pledged €1m and the Association Pour Le Developpement de la Librairie de Création (ADELC) €800,000 in interest-free loans, while Bougerol was to bring another €800,000 to the table.
Bougerol, who like Sevestre is also a former SLF president, has not decided whether to present a new bid if the group goes into receivership. "I will certainly study the dossier, but I won’t make any decision until I have seen it," he said. In that case, he would have to start from zero with the CNL and ADELC as the takeover would be on a completely different footing, he added.
"If the court accepts an independent bookseller as a buyer, we will back them of course, although I cannot say for the moment how much money we would lend them," CNL president Vincent Monadé told The Bookseller. "The Sauramps shareholders should have acted much sooner," he added.
Christian Thorel, who owns the bookshop Ombres Blanches in Toulouse, has harsh words about de Montchalin’s role in the affair. The latter showed "a really inconsequential (attitude)" Thorel said in an interview with the online book magazine ActuaLitté today. He also announced prematurely to the press that it was almost a done deal, added Thorel. "He should know what he has to do to assume his responsibilities."
De Montchalin did not respond to The Bookseller’s request for comment. The Sauramps management has said it will not be commenting beyond yesterday's press statement.