No-one could accuse Arnaud Montebourg of being a good loser, reports The Economist.
The French industry minister had made it clear since March 5th that in the battle between two bidders for SFR, France’s second-biggest telecoms operator, he considered Bouygues Telecom, its third-biggest, the right choice.
Their fusion would remove one player from France’s intensely competitive telecoms sector and allow the remaining firms to build margins and invest.
But Vivendi, SFR’s parent, thought otherwise. On March 14th it said it would negotiate only with rival bidder Numericable, France’s largest cable operator. Merging the two would not immediately stop the price wars in telecoms, but by bringing together complementary rather than competing businesses might well encounter less resistance from competition authorities and result in fewer firings.
Did Mr Montebourg bow out, leaving the private sector to make its own decisions? Not so you’d notice it
The Numericable bid presents numerous problems, Mr Montebourg said on French radio on March 14th, not least for the taxman. Though Numericable itself is a French firm and listed on the Paris stock exchange, its parent company, Altice, is registered in Luxembourg and listed in Amsterdam.
Patrick Drahi, the founder and chairman of Altice and the driving force behind Numericable, controls his share of Altice through a holding company in Guernsey, a British tax haven. Mr Drahi himself has both Israeli and French citizenship and is a Swiss resident.
“Mr Drahi will have to repatriate the bulk of his belongings and goods to Paris, in France,” Mr Montebourg thundered. “We are going to have some fiscal questions to ask him.”
Read more of this report from The Economist.