“The media reports are no news to me.” On Friday afternoon, Cord Witkowski refused to elaborate any further beyong these few dry words. The spokesman of Nordenia International (Greven / Germany; www.nordenia.com) did not want to comment on the alleged plans of the private equity company Oaktree Capital Management (Los Angeles / USA; www.oaktreecapital.com) to sell the German group. Attempts to reach Herrmann T. Dambach, CEO of Oaktree’s Germany office in Frankfurt, were fruitless by the time this issue went to press.

Citing sources in the know, the Reuters news agency reported that Oaktree had tasked the investment bank Goldman Sachs with the sale of Nordenia. The news agency further reports that binding offers are scheduled to arrive in mid-February already. Oaktree allegedly wants to receive some EUR 600m (USD 844m) for the German group. TPG Capital, Triton and Sun Capital Partners are rumoured to be possible buyers, the latter mostly because of its existing operations in the packaging sector – in the form of Veriplast Solutions (Paris / France; www.veriplast.com) and Exopack (South Carlonia / USA; www.exopack.com).

Oaktree had acquired 90% of Nordenia’s shares at the beginning of 2006. At the time, group sales generated by Nordenia’s 3,000 employees amounted to EUR 430m. Sales in 2008 stood at EUR 736m, at a film production volume of 210,000 t.