Patrick Drahi is about to take American investors for a ride. Unfortunately, some won’t survive the journey.

“The only merit of American cars is that we can carry corpses in the trunk without having to fold their legs,” wrote French crime novelist Frédéric Dard, as noted in a piece in Les Echoes. Ironically, the French newspaper notes, the transport of “stiffs” is perfectly legal on Wall Street, where the art of the deal is often more important than its outcome for investors that take a bath.

This time, Mr. Drahi is taking advantage of Wall Street’s ability to Think Big with other people’s money. The newspaper notes he is not loading the trunk more than average, at least for the United States. “From Twitter to Snap, investors are used to swallowing the ‘private equity’ snakes as long as it delivers an outstanding success like Facebook from time to time.”

While Europe looks on with astonishment at the audacity of Mr. Drahi’s big splash in the States, the newspaper notes American investors don’t seem to notice Mr. Drahi has popped his trunk open on them even as he showers current shareholders with $1.28 billion in dividend payouts as the company constantly attempts to refinance its enormous debts. Altice’s two biggest financial allies, a Canadian employee retirement fund and BC Partners, seem more than happy unloading half their stake in Altice USA during the recent IPO, transferring their exposure to Drahi’s wily ways to someone else.

In the ultimate example of “heads I win, tails you lose” business practices, Drahi has well insulated himself from his own investors and from any consequences for his future mistakes. Les Echoes notes that as part of the complex backing away of Drahi’s North American partners, 98.5% of the voting rights will be conferred not to the buyers, but to Altice itself. Altice will also collect a breathtaking $30 million in fees from the unload. Not to be outdone, Altice’s top three executives are also constructing an elaborate protective cocoon for themselves. In the event of any damage control that changes Altice’s control of ownership, the three get more than $70 million in bonuses.

The newspaper later wrote Altice’s IPO was the latest example of the complacency of the U.S. stock market.

“Altice does not hide its vocation of feeding the great appetite for concentration of cable in the United States,” the newspaper wrote. “The telecoms tycoon passed the final test of entry into the temple of stock market temples.”

While Drahi promises great upgrades that will require considerable investment, his actual record of spending is more mixed than his ambitious statements would otherwise suggest. Upgrades at his acquisition SFR-Numericable languished for years as the company’s attention was more focused on making additional acquisitions, usually with borrowed cash. More than one million customers left while waiting for upgrades, even as service continued to deteriorate.

Back in France, some shareholders are pushing back over what they feel is Drahi’s personal conflict of interest, which may make him very rich off their money.

Last week, activist fund CIMA, a minority shareholder of Altice’s SFR wireless company, filed a complaint with the Tribunal de Grande Instance (TGI) in Paris, noted Le Figaro.

Altice Name Change Will Personally Profit Drahi

CIMA claimed that by 2018, all of Drahi’s acquisitions will be consolidated under the Altice brand. Oddly, Drahi is willing to toss away the SFR brand, which is widely recognized in France and worth an estimated €904 million, and replace it with Altice — a name hardly known inside or outside of France.

“Altice has no commercial recognition,” says Catherine Berjal, co-founder of CIMA.

But then that misses the fact Altice’s trademark is held personally by Drahi and he won’t be offering it for free. Every company owned by Altice will be required to pay unspecified annual royalties to Mr. Drahi starting three years from now, just to license the use of the Altice name.

Making Someone Else Pay Your Fine

When Altice was caught violating French competition regulations, it was fined €80 million by France’s Competition Authority. SFR shareholders were unpleasantly surprised to discover SFR alone covered the fine, despite the ruling which found Altice and SFR equally liable.

Drahi the Landlord

SFR headquarters, Saint-Denis

Finally, some shareholders are scrutinizing SFR’s sudden decision to relocate its corporate headquarters, despite signing a 12-year lease in 2013 for brand new offices in Saint-Denis, priced at €490 per square meter. Berjal notes this sudden move doesn’t make any business sense, until one digs a little deeper.

“Patrick Drahi has decided to break this lease to move SFR into a building that belongs to him personally,” Berjal said, adding the move will result in a spectacular rent increase. “The rent is €725 per square meter [at Drahi’s property], not to mention the contract termination fees that have to be paid [to the old landlord].”

CIMA feels Drahi isn’t exactly representing the best interests of shareholders, just himself.

“The operations mentioned in this complaint were perfectly legal and in compliance with the applicable rules of governance,” countered a spokesman for SFR contacted by AFP.

Drahi’s Ultimate Compensation Package: $43 Billion+

The Wall Street Journal has been tracking Drahi’s dreams of being one of the world’s most richly compensated CEOs, perhaps the richest ever.

Even the most casual investor couldn’t turn a blind eye to Drahi’s original plan for personal compensation, which would have given him $817 million in compensation over five years simply by paying him a management fee of 0.2% of revenues plus a performance fee of 5% of increased cash flows, which was child’s play to accomplish with additional acquisitions or rate hikes. One minority shareholder balked, complaining this kind of compensation was “too easy to achieve.”

Plan “B” could redefine CEO greed for years to come. In addition, to Drahi’s outstanding stock options, worth €55 million at the current stock price, Drahi would keep his 59% ownership of Altice, a stake currently worth €19 billion today. If Drahi manages to triple the share price, his net worth automatically increases another $43 billion dollars. But Drahi is also asking for a bonus: another 30 million shares of Altice stock to be awarded to him automatically. The first 10 million shares automatically are his if he is still alive and breathing at Altice in 2020. Another 10 million shares show up if the share prices doubles by then, and yet another 10 million go into his portfolio if the share price triples by the end of 2021. That represents another €1.1 billion on top of the $43 billion.

That may be why some in the French press have dubbed Drahi the “Big, Bad Wolf.” Les Echoes notes Wall Street has never particularly minded this kind of wolf, as long as it confined itself to eating consumers. But Drahi’s desire to also drain his investors is what the newspaper cautions is a “big bad wolf none would have expected.”

If the average customer isn’t paying $90 a month for broadband service, they are paying too little and that needs to stop.

That is the view of persistent rate hike advocate Jonathan Chaplin, a Wall Street analyst with New Street Research, who has advocated for sweeping broadband rate increases for years.

“We have argued that broadband is underpriced, given that pricing has barely increased over the past decade while broadband utility has exploded,” Chaplin wrote in a note to investors. “Our analysis suggested a ‘utility-adjusted’ ARPU target of ~$90. Comcast recently increased standalone broadband to $90 with a modem, paving the way for faster ARPU growth as the mix shifts in favor of broadband-only households. Charter will likely follow, once they are through the integration of Time Warner Cable.”

Companies that fail to raise prices risk being downgraded by analysts with views like these, which can have a direct impact on a stock’s share price and the executive compensation and bonus packages that are often tied to the company’s performance.

But there is a dilemma and disagreement between some cable industry analysts about how much companies can charge their customers. Companies like Cable ONE have been aggressively raising broadband prices to unprecedented levels in some of the poorest communities in the country, which worries fellow Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett from MoffettNathanson LLC.

“Never mind that the per capita income in Cable ONE’s footprint is the lowest (by far) of the companies we [Moffett’s firm] cover, or that the percentage of customers living below the poverty line is the highest (also by far),” Moffett told his investor subscribers. “What matters is that there is very little competition in Cable ONE’s footprint. If you want high-speed broadband, where else are you going to go? The unspoken fear among their larger peers is that over-reliance on broadband pricing invites regulatory intervention, not just for Cable ONE, but for everyone.”

Chaplin thinks the risk from gouging broadband customers is next to zero. With cable TV becoming less profitable every day, all the big profits that can be made will be made from broadband, where cable operators often enjoy a monopoly on high-speed service.

According to Chaplin, if customers value internet access, they will pay the higher prices cable companies charge. So what are companies waiting for? Raise those prices!

Wall Street wants a deal between T-Mobile and Sprint rich with fees and “synergies,” but nobody counting the money cares whether consumers will actually get better service or lower prices as a result of another wireless industry merger.

Recently, more players have entered the T-Mo/Sprint Drum Circle, seeming in favor of the merger of America’s third and fourth largest wireless carriers. Moody’s Investor Service wouldn’t go as far as Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure in playing up the deal’s “synergy savings” won from cutting duplicate costs (especially jobs) after the merger, but was willing to say the combination of the two companies could cut their combined costs by $3 billion or more annually. Based on earlier mergers, most savings would come from eliminating redundant cell sites, winning better volume pricing on handsets, dramatic cuts in employees and back office operations, and spectrum sharing.

“Imagine if you had a supercharged maverick now going after AT&T and Verizon to stop this duopoly,” Claure told an audience in Miami.

Wells Fargo called Sprint’s large spectrum holdings in the 2.5GHz band undervalued, and could be an important part of any transaction.

Sprint has more high-band spectrum than any other carrier in the U.S. Much maligned for its inability to penetrate well indoors and for its reduced coverage area, most carriers have not prioritized use of these frequencies. But forthcoming 5G networks, likely to offer a wireless alternative to wired home broadband, will dominate high frequency spectrum, leaving Sprint in excellent condition to participate in the 5G splash yet to come.

Wall Street banks can expect a small fortune in fees advising both companies on a merger deal and to assist in arranging its financing. Any deal will likely be worth more than the $39 billion AT&T was willing to pay for T-Mobile back in 2011. With that kind of money at stake, any merger announcement will likely be followed by millions in spending to lobby for its approval. Washington regulators ultimately rejected AT&T’s 2011 buyout, arguing it was anti-competitive. Reducing the U.S. marketplace to three national cellular networks is likely to again raise concerns that reduced competition will lead to higher prices.

A merger is also likely to be disruptive to customers, particularly because Sprint and T-Mobile run very different operations and systems. Moody’s predicted it could take up to five years for any merger to fully consummate, giving AT&T and Verizon considerable lead time to bolster their networks and offerings. Moody’s notes Sprint also has a history with bad merger deals, notably its acquisition of Nextel, which proved to be a distracting nightmare.

“If [another merger] stalls or is derailed by operational missteps, the downside is catastrophic,” Moody’s noted.

Viacom, which owns cable networks including Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, and TV Land, will launch a cheap non-sports bundle of entertainment cable networks viewable online for $10-20 a month this year.

Viacom has lost basic cable viewers at an accelerating rate as cable operators drop their networks or repackage them in more expensive basic tiers as Viacom raises wholesale rates cable companies pay to carry the channels.

Viacom CEO Bob Bakish talked about the new service this morning at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston. Bakish said most of the current “skinny cable TV” bundles were priced at around $40 a month, which is too expensive to attract “cord-never millennials” that frequently don’t subscribe to cable television.

“The transformational opportunity is to bring in a new entry segment at a much lower price point,” Bakish said. The cable industry needs “a path to bring in someone who wants high-quality entertainment” but has no interest in expensive sports networks.

That is why Bakish wants to create a cheap entertainment-oriented bundle of networks that omits sports-related channels. But Bakish has also repeatedly stressed he has no intention of giving consumers a comprehensive online alternative to traditional cable TV, telling investors Viacom is “not creating inexpensive opportunities to serve as an alternative.”

Bloomberg News reported Viacom was talking to Discovery and AMC Networks about participating in the new service. The only complication may be a backlash from sports programmers like Walt Disney’s ESPN and 21st Century Fox, Inc., which have contracts requiring providers to include the sports networks in their most popular bundles. Some contracts even limit how many customers are permitted to sign up for a sports-free TV package, according to Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC.

“It’s meant to dissuade distributors from doing something like this,” Nathanson told Bloomberg. “The issue is how many subscribers they can have before the legal questions appear.”

Bakish may also be trying to remind cable and satellite companies that Viacom can always go direct-to-consumers if operators banish Viacom’s networks off the cable dial or move them to a more expensive tier, although there is no guarantee the new service will bundle all of Viacom’s networks.

Viacom has seen its relationships with cable and satellite providers deteriorate over the last few years under prior management. Some smaller cable companies including Cable One dropped Viacom channels from their cable systems over cost issues in 2014, and many more subscribers have seen Viacom networks temporarily dropped as a result of contract renewal disputes. Bakish has made repairing relations with cable and satellite customers a priority since taking over as CEO in December, but he still has a way to go.

Recently, Charter Communications moved Viacom networks out of its Select basic cable TV package and moved them to its most expensive Gold package for new customers. With only a minority of customers signed up for Gold service, Viacom networks could eventually lose millions of viewers as Time Warner Cable and Bright House customers adopt Spectrum packages in the next few years. If those customers do not subscribe to Gold or refuse to pay extra for a “digipak” of Gold’s basic channels without the premium networks, they will lose access to Viacom channels when they change TV plans.

That issue also concerns Wall Street analysts who believe it could eventually erode Viacom’s viewer base. Bakish made certain to tell investors Viacom was not surrendering to Charter’s “re-tiering.”

“We firmly don’t believe they have the rights to do that,” Bakish said. “We’ve been in discussions with them. We’ve got to get that resolved.”

If it is resolved, those networks may again be available to Select TV customers.

Viacom, AMC, and Discovery are partnering up to offer a $10-20 entertainment-only package on streaming basic cable networks for consumers, as this Bloomberg News story reports. (2:58)

Thought paying $65 a month for broadband service is too much? Just wait a few years when one Wall Street analyst predicts you will be paying twice that rate for internet access, all because the cable industry is gradually achieving a high-speed broadband monopoly.

Jonathan Chaplin, New Street Research analyst, predicts as a result of cord-cutting and the retreat of phone companies from offering high-speed internet service competition, the cable industry will win as much as 72.2% of the broadband market by the year 2020. With it, they also win the power to raise prices both fast and furiously.

In a note to investors, Chapin wrote the number of Americans left to sign up for broadband service for the first time has dwindled, and most of the rest of new customer additions will come at the expense of phone companies, especially those still selling nothing better than DSL.

“Our long-term penetration forecast is predicated on cable increasing its market share, given a strong network advantage in 70% of the country (this assumes that telco fiber deployment increases from 16% of the country today to close to 30% five years from now),” Chaplin wrote.

Cable companies already control 65% of the U.S. broadband market as of late last year. Chaplin points out large cable operators have largely given up on slapping usage caps and usage pricing on broadband service to replace revenue lost from TV cord-cutting, so now they are likely going to raise general broadband pricing on everyone.

“Comcast and Charter have given up on usage-based pricing for now; however, we expect them to continue annual price increases,” Chaplin said. “As the primary source of value to households shifts increasingly from pay-TV to broadband, we would expect the cable companies to reflect more of the annual rate increases they push through on their bundles to be reflected in broadband than in the past. Interestingly, Comcast is now pricing standalone broadband at $85 for their flagship product, which is a $20 premium to the rack rate bundled price.”

Chaplin himself regularly cheerleads cable operators to do exactly as he predicts: raise prices. Back in late 2015, Chaplin pestered then CEO Robert Marcus of Time Warner Cable about why TWC was avoiding data caps, and in June of that year, Chaplin sent a note to investors claiming broadband was too cheap.

“Our analysis suggests that broadband as a product is underpriced,” Chaplin wrote. “Our work suggests that cable companies have room to take up broadband pricing significantly and we believe regulators should not oppose the re-pricing (it is good for competition & investment).”

“The companies will undoubtedly have to take pay-TV pricing down to help ‘fund’ the price increase for broadband, but this is a good thing for the business,” Chaplin added. “Post re-pricing, [online video] competition would cease to be a threat and the companies would grow revenue and free cash flow at a far faster rate than they would otherwise.”