Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, 31-year-old entrepreneur, son and heir of Leonardo Del Vecchio, founder of the large eyewear company EssilorLuxottica, is also interested in purchasing Il Fatto Daily. His personal investment company, LMDV capital, which he used for the acquisitions, started a due diligence activity on the publisher of Il Fatto, Seif (Società editorial il Fatto), precisely to evaluate an offer for the purchase. “Due diligence” is the analysis of the accounts of a company you want to acquire to verify that everything is in order. Il Fatto writes that the founding shareholders of Seif have said they are not interested in selling their shares.
A few months ago Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio had bought a large share of Editoriale Nazionale (En), the group to which the newspapers Il Giorno, La Nazione, Il Resto del Carlino and QN Quotidiano Nazionale belong. At the end of last year it had also acquired a minority equal to 30% of Il Giornale and attempted to acquire the Gedi publishing group (la Repubblica, la Stampa, HuffPost Italia, Radio Deejay). But let’s go in order.
The due diligence after the dispute with the Fact
On Sunday 25 October, LMDV Media, Del Vecchio’s publishing investment company, started “a due diligence activity of a confirmatory nature on certain information” relating to Il Fatto editorial company in order to promote a voluntary and totalitarian takeover bid (Opa) on Seif. This can be read in a note released by the investment company. The ultimate objective of the board of directors is the delisting from Piazza Affari (the official cancellation of a stock or company from a stock exchange).
Del Vecchio junior, therefore, would be preparing a possible attack on Fatto Daily, a newspaper with which in recent days he had had a dispute over alleged wiretaps by his managers relating to the Equalize investigation. To respond to Marco Travaglio’s newspaper article which reported those wiretaps, Del Vecchio spoke of “journalism crimes”. So is this a real project or a mere provocation? What’s really at stake? We’ll see. Meanwhile, doubts and questions hover over the plan.
“Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio is a publisher, but he has a strange idea of how to relate to the free press. After insulting us for some of our articles on his business and the events that concern him, yesterday the fourth son of Leonardo, founder of the giant Luxottica who died in 2022, decided that the best response is to aim to buy it”, we read today in Il Fatto, in an article signed by Carlo Di Foggia.
The fact is that if the due diligence is successful, LMDV Media reports, a takeover bid will be launched on the company that publishes Il Fatto at the price of 0.286 euros per share, for a total value of 7,152,860 euros. The consideration, the company specifies, would incorporate a premium of approximately 30% compared to the official price of Seif shares recorded on 23 October 2026 and a premium of 16.85% compared to the average price of the previous six months.
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Del Vecchio’s offer: Travaglio would remain director
Del Vecchio junior’s company says that the operation was born “from the entrepreneur’s passion for the publishing sector, with the aim of taking over the newspaper, stabilizing its accounts and guiding its relaunch”. The offer is, however, subject to precise conditions of effectiveness, including “the achievement of an overall shareholding at least equal to or greater than 82.9% of the voting capital in the ordinary meeting. This threshold is considered indispensable to make the internal statutory limit which prohibits a single shareholder from owning more than 17% of the company’s share capital inoperative”.
The 4 million “for continuity”
According to preliminary estimates conducted by LMDV Media on public documentation, in reality, Seif may “need an injection of up to 4 million euros” in recapitalization in the next 24 months to support business and editorial continuity. Whether it is a strategy to provoke or bring “the enemy” closer, after the recent clashes, LMDV Media announces that its plan, if successful, would include the confirmation of Marco Travaglio as director, “with the explicit desire to keep the newspaper’s line unchanged”.
The response of the founding members
In short order, the founding members of the Daily Fatto blocked the way for Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio. A few hours after the announcement of the entrepreneur’s possible takeover bid for the company that publishes the newspaper, Antonio Padellaro, Cinzia Monteverdi, Francesco Aliberti, Peter Gomez, Marco Travaglio, Marco Lillo and Luca d’Aprile made it known that “they are not interested in selling their share and therefore do not want to participate in a possible takeover bid that could be promoted by Lmdv Media following the outcome of the announced due diligence”. Il Fatto publishing company itself announced this in a note, recalling that the seven founding members hold shares equal to the majority of the company’s share capital. Without their sale the LMDV Media project will not be able to go far.
Seif then recalls in the press release that, as indicated by LMDV Media itself, the “promotion of any offer would be subordinated, among other things, to the achievement of an overall shareholding in the issuer at least equal to or greater than 82.9% of the voting capital in the ordinary meeting, so as to make the statutory limit which does not allow one to own Seif shares in excess of 17% of the share capital inoperative”. The board of directors of Seif, it is announced, will meet in the next few days to examine the pre-announcement of the offer from Del Vecchio junior’s company, but the outcome of the meeting appears to be a foregone conclusion.