The $1,009M EBITDA beat included a $65M insurance reclassification — strip it and the underlying went backwards.

• What the press release said. FY2025 EBITDA $1,009M cleared the $917–975M guide and arrived alongside a fresh $1.18B/2030 target. The market read momentum and held the $22 median price target unchanged.
• What the audit note shows. $65M of ElecLink insurance compensation was booked inside EBITDA in 'other income' — only $6M was actually collected in cash; $59M sits as a receivable. Ex-insurance, the company's own restated FY2025 EBITDA was $966M, against an FY2024 reported base of $865M, or minus 1% like-for-like in native units (EUR strengthened sharply between period-ends).
• What the equity is being asked to underwrite. The $1.18B/2030 target requires +22% EBITDA over five years from a line that just printed flat-to-down on a clean basis — and the FY2026 mid-guide of $988M is barely above that underlying.

A 60-year treaty, an Aena-grade margin, and half the tunnel still unsold.

The Treaty of Canterbury and the Concession Agreement formally preclude a competing fixed link, and the Railway Usage Contract locks Eurostar/SNCF/DB/GBRF tolls at CPI minus 1.1 points through 2052 — $483M of bond-like revenue. EU ETS hits 70% of ferry emissions in 2025 and 100% from January 2026; the UK Seafarers Wages Act and France's Loi Le Gac have closed the labour-cost arbitrage since 2024. The next decade of EBITDA growth lives in the path-occupancy line — Virgin won Temple Mills depot access in October 2025, Eurostar ordered 30 Avelia Horizon trains, and Trenitalia is targeting 2029 — capacity that drops to EBITDA at near-zero marginal cost.

Two strategic blockholders sit one share from a forced takeover bid — and one of them disavowed the bid in writing.

• Eiffage at 29.40% / 29.50% voting. Built from 7.11% (early 2024) to 27.66% by YE 2025 with an off-market block from Platinum Compass on 23 October 2025 at $20.78 per share (price-protected for 18 months); added another 1.74% on-market between 23–26 March 2026 at $20.01 average. Sits 0.60pt below the AMF 30% mandatory-tender threshold.
• Mundys at 25.0% / 29.9% voting. The Italian infrastructure group (Edizione/Benetton + Blackstone) moved from 15.49% to 19% on 31 March 2026, then exercised its option for a further ~6% after UK regulatory clearance on 13 April 2026; CEO Andrea Mangoni has been on the Getlink Board since July 2025. Combined ~54% of capital and ~59% of votes between the two.
• The catch. Eiffage's October 2025 letter to the AMF stated explicitly that it does not intend to take control and is not acting in concert with anyone else — yet both CEOs personally bought GET shares on the open market in 2025 (de Ruffray 2,000 at $18.10 in March 2025; Mangoni 3,942 at $17.92 in December 2025). Either someone crosses 30% and a mandatory bid follows, or the disavowal holds.

The 'infrastructure' segment is a merchant power-trading book with an open-ended regulator hand on the upside.

• Revenue collapsed and rebounded. ElecLink ran $579M (2023) → $291M (2024) → $264M (2025), a 57% two-year decline driven by two cable failures in nine months and normalising FR–UK power spreads. Q1 2026 came back at $80M (+112% YoY); by the 23 April Q1 trading update, 89% of 2026 capacity had been pre-sold for $342M, with only 36% of 2027 secured.
• The $606M provision the market doesn't price. An IAS-37 profit-sharing reserve grew $129M YoY at FY2025 (from $477M at YE 2024); the company itself notes that 'the final rules governing the practical implementation of this profit-sharing mechanism' remain to be clarified. This is the largest unquantified accounting estimate in the file.
• What it means for the multiple. A 70% headline segment EBITDA margin sits exposed to a regulator-shaped cash claw-back, and a 25-year merchant exemption is not a 60-year concession. The bull case treats ElecLink as recurring infrastructure cash flow; the auditor's KAM language treats it as a model with a moving denominator.

A $517M payout against $439M of company-defined free cash flow — and management committed to grow it €0.05 a year to 2030.

On the broader CFO-minus-capex definition, FCF was $736M and the proposed $517M payout absorbs ~70% — comfortable, but the company-published FCF metric ($439M) does not cover the cash going out the door, and that figure fell $114M YoY in 2025. The committed path to roughly $1.18 by 2030 sits against an EBITDA line that is essentially flat ex-insurance. At ~4× leverage, a missed print and the yield would need to clear at a wider level — a setup the current ~16× EV/EBITDA multiple does not embed.