French retailer Casino, advisor deny reports on potential sale of Brazil's GPA

French retailer Casino on Thursday denied for the second time this week Brazilian press reports that said it had hired a financial advisor to sell its Brazilian supermarket unit GPA, and the advisory firm named in the reports also denied them.

Newspaper Valor Econômico reported that Casino had hired financial advisory group Rothschild & Co SCA to explore asset sales for the purpose of debt reduction.

Rothschild said in an e-mail to Reuters the information was incorrect and Casino has not hired it to explore asset sales.

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The company also denied a similar report in O Globo newspaper earlier this week that Rothschild had been mandated to look at the sale of both Casino’s Brazilian and Colombian operations.

The French bank was hired in 2016 to help GPA sell its electronics retailer Via Varejo SA, sources familiar with the talks have said, but those efforts have so far been unsuccessful.

In morning trading, shares in Via Varejo were down 5 percent, among the biggest decliners on the Sao Paulo stock exchange index.