CARACAS, (Reuters) – Venezuelan opposition TV channel Globovision said on Monday it had accepted a buyout offer, calling its operations financially and politically unfeasible after rows with the government and high inflation.
The sale of Globovision, the only openly anti-government media channel, will occur after an April presidential election. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Globovision’s majority owner, Guillermo Zuloaga, said the group buying the channel was led by Juan Domingo Cordero, who runs an insurance company and is a former head of the local stock exchange.
“We are economically inviable, because our revenues no longer cover our cash needs,” Zuloaga said in a statement.
“We are politically unfeasible, because we are in a totally polarized country and against a powerful government that wants to see us fail.”
Zuloaga said the company was suffering from a revenue shortfall, rising prices, and costly efforts to try to help the opposition win last year’s presidential election.
Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles narrowly lost to Hugo Chavez in October. Chavez led a self-styled socialist revolution for 14 years in the South American OPEC nation until his death last week from cancer.
Capriles, the centrist governor of Miranda state, has since announced another bid. He will face Chavez’s preferred successor, acting President Nicolas Maduro, in an election on April 14.
Zuloaga added that there were also doubts about whether it could get its concession renewed after legal tangles with the government.
In 2007, the government declined to renew the license for another opposition channel, RCTV, prompting widespread criticism.
