Telecoms provider Altice Portugal has reportedly received a buyout offer of €6 billion ($6.6bn) from Warburg Pincus.

As reported by the Financial Times, Warburg has teamed up with former Credit Suisse chair António Horta-Osório in its bid.

Horta-Osório left Credit Suisse last year and has previously been chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group.

The FT's sources say he is "more than an adviser on the Warburg bid."

Altice, which is owned by French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, is looking to ease its debt, which sits at $60 billion.

The company is open to selling its telecoms business and has recently spun off its data center assets, forming a new company with more than 250 facilities in France, which was then sold to Morgan Stanley.

The company is selling 70 percent of the new company, UltraEdge, to Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners (MSIP), a transaction which values UltraEdge at €764 million ($836.5m) and is expected to close in the first half of 2024.

In November 2022, rumors suggested Drahi, was looking to offload up to 92 data centers in its home country, reportedly comprising a ‘handful’ of larger sites and ‘dozens’ of smaller facilities.

Altice has also been hit by a corruption probe this year, which led to the arrest of Drahi's fellow co-founder and former chief operating officer Armando Pereira.

Drahi told investors in August that he felt "betrayed."

US equity firm Warburg is acquiring telco assets, having raised more than $17 billion in October for its latest flagship private equity fund (the largest raise in the company's near 60-year history).

Warburg acquired a stake in T-Mobile’s Netherlands business last year, and bought satellite operator Inmarsat for $6bn in 2019.