Business
Debt did him down: how Denis O’Brien lost his grip on Digicel
After its initial success in the Caribbean, Digicel built up crippling debt. Last week the bondholders’ solution to the $4.6bn owed was to wipe out some of it – but only in return for O’Brien giving up the vast majority of his stake in the firm
In the end it came down to a single word: leverage. And it has cost Denis O’Brien the multibillion-euro empire he has been assiduously building for more than two decades.
It started off as a small mobile phone company, initially in Jamaica, before spreading rapidly across the white sandy beaches and blue seas of the Caribbean and then the South Pacific. Digicel, as the company was called, turned into something that had eluded O’Brien since ...
