Drahi personally sued by Apollo and Oaktree over cable coup

A new front in the bitter credit war

The French telecom billionaire Patrick Drahi now finds himself at the center of a new and personal lawsuit from some of the world's heaviest credit managers. According to the Financial Times, Apollo Global Management, Oaktree Capital Management and the asset management arm of JPMorgan Chase have filed suit against Drahi in New York State Supreme Court, demanding he be held personally liable for what they call a "brazen" scheme to move the company's most valuable assets beyond creditors' grasp (FT, September 28, 2026).

The company in question is Optimum Communications, formerly known as Altice USA, the American cable and broadband company Drahi built through a years-long, debt-financed acquisition strategy.

Cablevision moved out of the collateral

At the heart of the new lawsuit is the so-called "asset drop-down" maneuver. According to the complaint, Optimum earlier in 2026 placed its single most valuable business — the Cablevision cable network in the New York area — into an "unrestricted subsidiary" structure, thereby moving it outside the collateral pledged to existing bondholders.

The newly created entity immediately raised significant new financing, according to the sources behind the case.

The bondholders claim this capital subordinated the existing creditors, while, according to the lawsuit, Optimum was already "hopelessly insolvent" at the time of the transaction — something that, under U.S. corporate law, can trigger personal liability for board chairs and controlling owners in cases of fraudulent conveyance and breach of fiduciary duty.

"The company is hopelessly insolvent, and has been for some time — a direct and inevitable result of Drahi's notorious business strategy, 'The Altice Way.'"

It is worth emphasizing that these are claims made by the plaintiffs in a fresh complaint, and that Drahi and his legal team have not yet filed their formal response. The Financial Times has not obtained confirmation of a comment from Drahi in the cited article.

Round two in a long-running credit war

This case does not stand alone. It is the latest escalation in a federal antitrust dispute that began in November 2025, when Optimum sued the same group of creditors — including Apollo, Oaktree, Ares, BlackRock, GoldenTree and PGIM — for what the company described as an illegal cartel.

In that case, which is before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (case 1:25-cv-09785), Optimum claimed that the creditors, through a "Cooperation Agreement," forced the company to negotiate with the entire bloc collectively, thereby pushing through a loan with an 8.875 percent fixed coupon — according to Optimum, 2–3 percentage points above market rate.

Optimum later added claims that Apollo, Ares and Oaktree had pressured the company's law firm Kirkland & Ellis by threatening to pull lucrative mandates, which prompted the firm to withdraw from the case in January 2026. The creditors, represented by Sullivan & Cromwell, have asked for the case to be dismissed, and have received backing from heavyweight industry organizations such as SIFMA, LSTA and Managed Funds Association, which argue that such cooperation agreements are necessary to protect minority lenders.

A debt mountain of over $20 billion

The backdrop is Optimum's enormous debt burden, estimated at between $23 and $26 billion, split between roughly $6.5 billion in bank loans and $16.8 billion in bonds. More than $6 billion of this is already due in 2027, creating acute pressure to refinance.

Drahi's Altice group has long been a textbook example of extreme leverage built up during the zero-interest-rate era, now running into resistance in a period of tighter monetary policy. Sister company Altice France underwent a similarly painful restructuring in 2024–2025, with around €24 billion in secured debt and a Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection filing in New York after creditors cut €8.6 billion in debt.

Shares in what was then called Altice USA fell from a peak above $38 in May 2021 to under $1 before the rebranding to Optimum — a collapse that illustrates just how brutally the market has punished overleveraged companies as capital costs rise.

What happens now

Both the federal antitrust case and the new lawsuit against Drahi personally are expected to be lengthy legal processes. The outcome could set a precedent for how far creditor syndicates can go in coordinating against borrowers — and how far controlling owners can go in moving assets out of creditors' collateral without risking personal liability.

For Norwegian and Nordic investors with exposure to U.S. high-yield bonds and private credit funds, the case serves as a reminder of the risk in the sector surrounding "liability management exercises" (LMEs), which have become an increasingly contentious restructuring technique in the American credit market in recent years.