Liberty Global, owner of Dutch cable firm UPC, is now the biggest shareholder in UPC’s main competitor Ziggo, the Financial Times reported on Saturday.

On Friday, private equity groups Warburg Pincus and Cinven sold about 17% of Ziggo’s shares, each raising €329m, the FT said. The shares were sold at a discount of nearly 8% on Thursday’s closing price.

Ziggo was founded five years ago following the merger of three separate cable operators and has 55% of the Dutch market. UPC has around 35%. The company was floated in Amsterdam last March and in total, the two private equity firms have made €3.4bn on their investment, the paper said.

Flop

US cable giant Liberty Global spent €632.5m buying 25.3 million Ziggo shares (12.7%) from British bank Barclays in March, raising the prospect it would mount a takeover.

At the time, Liberty Global described the purchase as ‘an attractive opportunity to make a strategic investment in a market where we already enjoy a sizeable presence through our UPC Netherlands subsidiary’.

Ziggo later issued a statement saying it noted the acquisition and would ‘continue to focus on executing Ziggo’s strategy in the best interests of its stakeholders’.