Market insiders have told Nosy Tarsee about a big battle being waged in the corporate realm which isn’t about nostalgia for the old broadcast days but about whose money will pay for whose mess.

Word going around is that the media unit closed the books still lugging billions in debt, and while the losses got smaller year-on-year, the top line shrank too.

The company’s been living off asset sales, most recently unloading a chunk of prime property just to keep the lenders calm.

Sources close to the family intimated to Nosy Tarsee the real sore point is one branch balking at tapping the energy arm’s resources to bail out the media business, while other relatives want the money to do exactly that.

The problem is the energy company isn’t a family piggy bank. There are outside institutional investors in there and thousands of minority shareholders who didn’t sign up to subsidize somebody else’s problem.

The math, though, is what should make everyone sit up. If a controlling stake in the energy arm were sold at the right price, that’s tens of billions of pesos

walking in the door, a number so much bigger than the media unit’s debt pile that even after taxes and obligations upstream, there’d be more than enough left to refinance the borrowings and buy real runway.

But Nosy Tarsee was told about money the family can spend on itself without dragging outside investors into it. Anything less than that is just moving the problem, not fixing it.

And no amount of pesos will rebuild a franchise that just isn’t there anymore.