On the one hand, what's being alleged doesn't actually sound...particularly bad? I don't see any obvious ethical concerns, and if it's against French law then that should be litigated in court, not on a blog post.
But on the other hand, the evidence presented to support these allegations seems awfully weak. For example, to make the claims work the author flags a list of people as being on "Team France" merely because they are French nationals, or in one case, merely because they happen to be on another board with someone who is a French national?
Weird, messy fights for control of public companies happens all the time; this doesn't even sound particularly interesting, even if the wildest claims being made are true.
Not sure if the author is just extremely naive, know there's nothing going on here but is trying to manufacture a controvery, or is just bad at writing and left out some key information. Whatever the case, I'm just left confused why I'm meant to care.
(Also, I'm more familiar with US finance. Maybe this really is unusual in France? Because poison pill provisions and standstill agreements and such are routine in the US. As are boards with power over things like, eg, issuing more shares.)
The author plays really loose with the meaning of nationalisation too. Because boy, we can definitely show you what proper nationalisation feels like.
What happened was, the NSIG bought a block the same size as Bpifrance did (a public, state-ran investment bank), the state didn't like it because China has a habit of coming in, draining companies dry of wealth and IP and leaving, and said fuck off. Nothing really surprising about any of this.
If Intel or Texas Instruments was about to be controlled by foreign powers, the US would intervene in the exact same way. Probably even harder actually.
This is political mechanics, it is interesting for the same reason kernel-code deep dives are interesting.
Europe has consistently failed to get a toehold in the high tech industry, which is quite stupefying considering the technical and social advantages of the Europeans. There are questions to ask - eg, we know what happens to the Elon Musk equivalent in China (Jack Ma, disappeared for a bit and moves to Japan for the healthy fresh air). What would happen to him in Europe? This article is a glimpse of why all the serious tech players end up being Asian and American.
Europe has much less of a hero worship problem, and the very idea of having to deal with an Euro Musk is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. There's always been very few public figures, the world's richest man is french, yet is not always spamming on Twitter.
The reality is, there's different specialties. Sure, serious tech players are American and Asian. Serious hardware players are European (TSMC and Samsung's foundries are non-existent without ASML, and therefore Apple doesn't get to make the M1), serious banking sector tech players are European, serious healthcare tech sector players are european, etc.
Semiconductor supply chains have been of recent interest due to unpredictable supply shortages, sanctions, export controls, diversification of electronics manufacturing from China to SE Asia, and billions of national investment in duplication of Asian fabs on US, EU and Japanese soil.
Those who care about semiconductor supply chains include those whose businesses depend on availability and integrity of computers, automobiles, aircraft, cellular networks, mobile phones, satellites and other communication systems.
The move is not unusuable, considering that China is more and more an aggressive competitor to Europe (and France) and has different values than Europe. Doesn't it make sense to lower the risk for all your strategic industries to depend on external and not dependable actors ?
What is really fascinating is HOW the move was done: it was not nationalized in the common sense (the state buying all the shares, using some "strategic actor" argument to force the nationalization) but France took operational control and locked the company. Quite a smart move actually...
Indeed if we did apply that level of analysis to other companies, we might not have emded up depending on a one man dictatoship flush with concentration camps, ongoing genocide and war preparations for essentials like PPE and antibiotics.. imagine that.
> Mr. Kissinger should have mentioned that he left statesmanship with China for business with China. Nowhere does he discuss Kissinger Associates, the highly successful consulting firm he founded almost three decades ago, which does a thriving business providing entrée to Chinese officials and business leaders for foreign companies. Indeed, Mr. Kissinger has spent more time negotiating business than negotiating policy.
China has done a good job of hiring us leaders when they "retire to become rich consultants". You see the same thing in Germany of course with their old pm and Russia. This is how the despots curry favor and get the elites to go against what's good for the country. I don't know about recent Kissinger impacts, but you see it in germany getting too dependent on russian gas.
And soon nations might even build enormous surveillance apparatuses by forcing "private" companies to participate in mass data sharing programs. Can you imagine??
I believe that is a reference to programs such as PRISM which indeed do force companies to hand over large amounts of data to the government (agencies)
Actually, there's an explicit theory in the (european) political landscape now: if democraties don't "level up" to match what is efficient in "totalitarian" (understand: China, Russia) countries, then democraties will lose the game... so we adopt part of the same playbook as our "competitors"
A "great firewall of Europe" is already more or less in development (watch at the european cybersec budget). It surely will be more "open" than in China but... Europe would like to be able to "watch" the internet traffic of any citizen (for their own safety and agains terrorism and pedophilia obviously and as usual)
Please note that "competitors" may be allies too: when the US give money to its own companies, or pass some extra-territorial laws... Europe try to do the same. To keep the playing field levelled ;-)
What you are implying is not super clear. Are you saying that the French nationalizations [1], which btw predate the emergence of democracy in 1789, are somehow signs of an autocratic system?
If you look at the Fifth Republic, most of the nationalizations in France happened under socialist governments, democratically elected, and with a mandate to do so from the population. Even the more rightwing French governments follow similar rules and nationalize companies to protect them and their workers (for instance from takeovers), or protect from foreign influence (and not just from countries with more imperialistic tendencies, for instance Italy for the ports).
Nothing of the sort applies here. France, its population and and government, would almost certainly approve of a nationalization in the first place if it were to protect their interests. But these Soitec changes seem relatively innocuous, and some of the claims are really paranoiac. For instance believing that a former CEA employee or administrator would continue to work undercover while at another company.
Of course France is a democratic country and thus its interests often conflate with the ones of its citizens. Nothing would prevent them from administering a company in a way that best suits their vision of the world, quite often matching a government perspective without any concertation.
There's no real evidence of the French state nationalizing Soitec.
>Last is Team France. With the exception of Francoise Chombar, they are all French Nationals. I put Francoise Chombar on Team France because she shares a board with Eric Meurice at Umicore, so I assume she’s on his team.
How exactly are these directors "Team France?" There's no reason to believe that they are agents of the French government just because they're French nationals.
>All of the board actions in conjunction means that this was likely premeditated by the controlling shareholders - the state of France - to further control Soitec.
Bpifrance and CEA are state-owned, but the free float is 61%, not to mention BlackRock's 8% stake. There doesn't seem to be anything stopping the shareholders who make up the free float from voting out the board or accepting a tender offer.
The board granted itself extensive power through a list of resolutions added to the typical bylaws of the company at the so-called “extraordinary shareholders general meeting”. It’s rare to see an extraordinary resolution, so it’s outright mind-boggling to see 35 resolutions. This is one of the broadest power grabs I’ve ever seen.
Is this a common restriction on shareholders?
When NSIG (National Silicon Industry Group aka China) bought the 14.5% stake in Soitec, they agreed to a standstill agreement on the shares ... Should NSIG Sunrise S.à.r.l acquire shares in the Company before the expiration of the Shareholders’ Agreement at the close of the Shareholders’ General Meeting called to approve the financial statements for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021, it would lose its rights relating to the Company’s governance
> There doesn't seem to be anything stopping the shareholders who make up the free float from voting out the board or accepting a tender offer.
What are some good examples of uncoordinated free-float shareholders influencing corporate governance?
"Team France" is more literal to the name than it seems. It's keeping the control within France, not necessarily connected to the government at the time
This piece is a puff piece written from the Anglosphere to drive panic and ensure that their broad narratives like the general anti-china narrative succeed in driving wedges on broad issues relating to French and paneuropean national security
Just a point : being nationalized by Cuba or the USSR in 2022 probably have better outcomes than being under the cusp of any Atos VP. The company will survive by bloodsucking on French and European contracts they do not deserve (but they will manage to respond to the exact hidden specs), then will sell the contract to crosoft or any of their daddies for play money.
Sorry for the serious people working there.
I might be wrong, but I've worked with Atos for 5 years, they are the worst. But their VP have friends in high places.
Our company CEO was very clear that this was just a cash grab from them, asked by France "ministère du numérique" (also, we ended up managing the Bullion software ourselves because their engineers couldn't follow RedHat documentation for more than 10 minutes, while still having to pay the support contract).
Slightly aside from the main topic, but I thought ST Micro was France's biggest semiconductor company but they're apparently technically considered Dutch now (same as Stellantis, the ownership structure of Fiat, Peugeot, Citroën, Chrysler, Opel; Airbus and plenty of others).
As for the effective nationalisation, yeah, France has a protectionist mindset when it comes to critical industries (e.g. energy generation, shipbuilding, semiconductors) as pretty much any non- ideologically blindly governed by free trade/capitalist absolutism country. Even the US which is as close to that as i can think of does blatant protectionism.
> France has a protectionist mindset when it comes to critical industries (e.g. energy generation, shipbuilding, semiconductors)
Between the power cuts due to the planned lack of maintenance of their nuclear reactions, and the loss of various contracts and shipyards, I'd have though they'd have learned the lesson.
But now, it now time for the ritual sacrifice of this last critical industry
2) It is largely admitted that the power sector in France was way better off before Europe got involved and forced to privatized some activities. Some go even further: Henri Proglio (former CEO of EDF) recently said during a senate commission that Germans were really hell bent on crippling EDF, and succeeded.
France was getting along just fine with publicly-owned EDF, but then the EU came along and decided we needed to privatize. Except that we can't actually expose consumers to volatile market prices, so the result is a Frankenstein abomination that gets all the downsides of the private sector with none of the upsides. Kind of like US healthcare
> but then the EU came along and decided we needed to privatize
There'd be a lot less anti-EU sentiment if there was a bright line against meddling with what should be internal affairs of sovereign states, instead of growing like a cancer until everything is under its purview, and national governments are just for show.
Thinking that an electricity market that buys and sells massively across state borders and pretty much form a continuous grid is solely "internal affairs" is just pure simplistic naivety
Of course, in crunch situations like last year it did show major issues (which were not all due to the way the market works to be fair).
The entire price issue that all of Europe suffered was that the price of electricity is set to the marginal cost of the latest gas turbines running. Produce 99% of your energy with nuclear, at 40€/MWh ? Still pay everything at 499€/MWh because the market must not be disturbed.
> There'd be a lot less anti-EU sentiment if there was a bright line against meddling with what should be internal affairs of sovereign states
GDPR, DMA and DSA, the Covid recovery funds, Schengen, Erasmsus. Just those massive things off the top of my head compensate the EU's normalisation across Europe in certain markets, which has had it's successes (in the making) like separating rail operations from infrastructure thus allowing competition, and non successes like the common European energy market which has plenty of good ideas on paper, but when faced with a massive energy crisis due to extreme external factors is terrible.
I don't know about Sweden, but the way it was done in the UK is the poster child of how not to do it. It's the worst possible way, with privatize mini-monopolies for every portion.
What i mean is something like in the rest of the EU, where you have the rail infrastructure provider, and then anyone can come in and apply for a license to operate trains as long as they fill the requirements, pay for the access and there's physical space.
So now in France we have competition on some routes, and it's amazing. Frecciarosa trains blow SNCF TGVs out of the water, and the mere threat of the coming competition forced SNCF to add many more options with low cost high and low speed trains.
Pretty much every advanced economy has used protectionist policies to develop at some point in their history. And all of them have also used free trade policies. There is no sacred dogma here, every trade arrangement has tradeoffs and every situation is unique.
Sounds like the "argument from middle ground" fallacy. Another perspective is that advanced economies have advanced in spite of the occasional misguided protectionist policy. Economics is not a hard science but the empirical evidence in favor of protectionism is very lacking.
A hypothetical example: you are the Supreme Leader of Slevobistan, and you want to make your domestic widget industry as strong as possible. Your rival nation Flerovia has a well-developed industry making low cost, high quality widgets with economies of scale.
Case A: Slevobistan is starting from scratch, has no domestic widget production whatsoever. In this case, if you fully open your market up to Flerovia, you will never get any on-shore widget industry! Startup domestic producers will be out-competed by the experienced Flerovian widget empires. Protectionist policies will make it harder for you to get cheap high-quality widgets in the short term, but they are necessary to build up your widget industry in the long term.
Case B: Slevobistan already has an advanced widget industry, and you want to preserve it. In this case, protectionist policies, by insulating your industry from competition, could allow it to fall behind and decline. Free trade will ensure continued competition, pushing your widget industry to innovate and improve.
As for empirical evidence, the historical record shows many examples of countries using protectionism to get ahead. For example USA (Civil War was in part over protectionism vs free trade, protectionist Northern industry won), Asian tigers, China…
Yes, I know what protectionism is and I know what the stated intentions behind it are. The problem is that it doesn't work overall. Yes, you can maybe "protect" an industry but at a greater cost than that of not protecting it. This can be reasoned from basic economic principles but there is also a lot of empirical evidence for it.
The essential problem, and probably the reason why so many people fall for it, is that the cost of protectionism are hard to perceive and diffuse but its benefits are visible and concentrated.
Its cost often manifest through consumers unknowingly paying higher prices or having a reduced standard of life. It's also difficult to know what productive economic activities might have been unlocked if workers of a protected industry had been working in more productive or innovative industries.
On the other hand, the groups that benefit most from protectionism are concentrated and therefore have a greater ability to lobby for it. There's always a concentrated group of winners and a large, diffuse group of losers.
To your "critical industries" argument, I have issue with that labeling. It seems a bit arbitrary and hard to justify. Aren't they all critical? The vast majority of countries seem to be doing fine without much of an industry that some other countries would consider "critical". The fact that there is such a great interdependence between our countries' economies is a good thing, not a bad one. Trading partners don't go to war with each other.
Finally, the Asian tigers are some the freest economies in the world. Hong Kong does not have any import tariffs. China is still lagging behind but caught up a lot since the late 80s... when it largely liberalized its trade policies. Regarding the civil war, it's quite a leap to think that the North's protectionism had any hand in their victory.
I agree with you that permanent protectionism is usually a sign of regulatory capture and cronyism. The "default" should be to let free market competition do its work. Protectionist policies should ideally be temporary, targeted measures; for example, as a response to the policy of a rival, or to build up a specific industry.
Again, there is no sacred doctrine here. Market competition usually produces some good incentives, but the invisible hand of the market is not the hand of God and from time to time it needs a nudge.
>and you want to make your domestic widget industry as strong as possible.
You've build in your whole sequence of decisions already when you got to that point. Why do you want to make your domestic widget industry as strong as possible, even if that comes at the expense of the standard of living of your people along with the strength of other industries?
- Flerovia is a rival, and diplomatic relations are rocky. They could cut off your critical widget supply, or raise the price, at any time. You want protection against this scenario.
- Slebovistan is a poor and undeveloped country. All your domestic manufacturing industries are terrible compared to rivals. If you don't build up at least a few of them, you will remain poor and undeveloped forever.
- Scientists believe that with sufficent R&D, they will be able to create new widget technology called "blidgets" that will revolutionize the world economy. Whoever gets there first is guaranteed endless riches. You want to win the blidget race.
> Between the power cuts due to the planned lack of maintenance of their nuclear reactions, and the loss of various contracts and shipyards, I'd have though they'd have learned the lesson
Im a French citizen and I'm inclined to agree we shouldn't be too protectionist, at all level of society: we should not protect jobs when a company is failing, we should not protect companies when a foreign one is gaining market shares, we should not nationalize something the Chinese are ready to subsidize.
We are not going to be treated in any special way by the adversaries of China, and there are ways for us to benefit from a more relaxed relationship with them, at the detriment of the US: it makes the US care more about us, it makes China think less about screwing us, it makes us infiltrate both deeper. I think, as a small country, our best bet is to look entirely harmless while selling to every sides.
End of the day nobody really wants to take us over because we're impossible to govern for a profit, so even if we fuck it up and China gains control of something we would have wanted for ourselves, we can just take it back after the fact and ask "so what, you want to invade us to deal with the people we cant even manage ourselves?". Honestly the best strategy for Taiwan too: be as insufferable and costly as possible so that even a successful take over just dump cost on the taker to convince them instead to keep a status quo where they just speak loudly waving their arms in patriotic excitement.
Somehow people around here in the balkans have been getting the feeling that pretty much every thing every EU country did in the last year, has been favorable to US and detrimental to european citizens... Be it Scholz, Macron, ursula, etc. Whatever move they do, people of europe lose, and US gains something.
> Somehow people around here in the balkans have been getting the feeling that pretty much every thing every EU country did in the last year, has been favorable to US and detrimental to european citizens... Be it Scholz, Macron, ursula, etc. Whatever move they do, people of europe lose, and US gains something.
Considering the last year includes the announcement of the Digital Markets and Services Acts, which will heavy hurt big oligopolistic companies by forcing them to be interoperable, and most of those are American, that's a weird take and the only explanation i can find is shitty media consumption blaming the US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
>Considering the last year includes the announcement of the Digital Markets and Services Acts, which will heavy hurt big oligopolistic companies
You're conflating the interests of a bunch of - maybe large but overall not that important - US corporations and the geopolitical interests of US as a nation.
These simply aren't on the same scale.
Things like the Digital Markets and Services Acts are at most mild irritants to the US.
They're also useful in the sense that they allow the EU to believe they're still in control of their destiny.
War-in-Ukraine level geopolitical events are what ultimately matter to the US as a country, not things that make Google grumpy.
The EU has backed the Ukraine, a war that was mostly created by the US pushing NATO boundaries outwards and backing Russia's dictator into a completely untenable corner.
The EU did this at its own detriment, with very questionable legitimacy (the EU was never given a mandate to deal in such geopolitical issues) plunging the entire continent into an energy crisis the like of which hasn't been seen since the oil crisis in the 70s.
Ask any small to medium company in Germany how they plan to pay their gas bills in the coming 2 years other that declaring bankruptcy.
> The EU has backed the Ukraine, a war that was mostly created by the US pushing NATO boundaries outwards and backing Russia's dictator into a completely untenable corner.
This is a curiously uninformed take that ignores the reality of Russia invading other sovereign countries.
Invading other sovereign countries is a "daily occurance" for many countries, be it middle east, africa or somethimes even within europe. So is bombing those countries, bombing across the disputed border, etc. Also drone bombing countries you're not even at war with and hitting weddings... or political leaders of those countries. Also interfering in countries internal politics, staging coups, assassinations, financing terrorists groups... oh wait, freedom fighters (they only become terrorists after they turn against usa), and targeting "digital targets", from "classic hacking" to stuff like stuxnet.
The difference now (for us, europeans) is, that because of this specific occupation, which isn't done by "us" or "our friends" (we would help with the occupation if it was), our politicians are willing to screw massively with our economies, degrade the quality of life for normal people, endanger basically everyone in the world with looming prospects of WW3, conduct possibly internal terrorism (nord steam) and kill a bunch of people who'd prefer living normal lives... and all of that for what? Because nato (mostly americans) are in a dick measuring contest with putin, or maybe as a 'revenge', because of cuba, or who knows.... in the end, politicans stay rich, military industrial complex gets a lot richer, normal people in europe get fucked, ad soldiers die.
No comparison is necessary. Many of the western-initiated wars were wrong, and should not have happened. That changes nothing about this war and its morality.
As if Russia is committing the original sin. Or as if international politics gives a damn, or has ever given. There is no other reality than sovereign countries invading themselves and separating themselves. Western world order is not different than what it always was.
> The EU has backed the Ukraine, a war that was mostly created by the US pushing NATO boundaries outwards and backing Russia’s dictator into a completely untenable corner.
The War in Ukraine was entirely created by Russia pushing Russia’s boundaries.
In any case, the US hasn’t pushed NATO’s boundaries, Eastern European countries applying to join NATO have “pushed” it. The US has mostly slowed that process more than the applying countries want to assure readiness (which, in part, is I guess a long-picture contributor to the war, since long before Putin decided NATO expansion was an affront to Russia, he was demanding Russia be admitted to NATO without the usual readiness process.)
> UN votes overwhelmingly to condemn US embargo of Cuba
> The vote in the 193-member General Assembly was 185 countries supporting the condemnation, the United States and Israel opposing it, and Brazil and Ukraine abstaining.
Cubans also overthrew a government that had very close ties to the US significantly damaging American business interests in the process. That does not make American action any more justifiable just much more understandable.
However again.. how is this relevant. Russia signed a treaty guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality and independence in the 90s. Which they totally threw away at the first signs of Ukraine actually becoming neutral rather than an Russian puppet state.
We've had similar conflicts and wars in the past, and we must look how we treated them to ask ourselves why are we treating this one differently... except that it was 'us' who started most of the others.
European (well, roman) law is based on a set of rules and treating everyone by those rules, and american (case) law is based on historic cases and how we treated those.
gas prices are at the same level they have been before the war
> untenable
what exactly was untenable about it? Russia could have easily come to some sort of an agreement more or less acceptable to all of the sides back in 2014. They had no interest in that. Neutral Ukraine was never an acceptable option to Putin…
Generally, for us ukraine is just another afghanistan mixed with cuba... there are some geopolitical interests and on the other hand, a "foreign superpower" is stepping on the front yard of nother superpower. A short war with maybe a regime change, maybe some lines on the map move, some angry stares, and that's it.
I live in a small eu country (slovenia), and even we helped with afghanistan, and our army is almost nonexistant. Also with syria. Other european countries did the same, lybia, iraq, etc. France is occupying or atleast strongly interfering with a bunch of african countries... and israel-palestine conflict is such a daily thing, noone even remembres it's happening anymore (except the people who die.. well, the people who lose friends and relatives due to it).
And now... instead of angry stares and maybe some basic sanctions, the european economy is getting fucked, we're at the brink of WW3, the german minister directly said that "we're at war with russia", energy prices are skyrocketing, industry is closing down, a food crisis is coming, and instead of a few dead and some destroyed vehicles, we're in six-digit numbers not even couting the wounded. Someone also destroyed the nord stream, it wasn't the russians, and somehow the media has forgotten about that.. the politicians either don't know and don't care who did it (very bad), or know and don't want to tell their people (even worse). And the "normal people" get fucked the most, as always.
Europe could have let putin have this and instead build an inpenetrable defensive wall at the eastern eu border as a response to that... but instead, we're at the brink of WW3. On the other hand, we're sending weapons and replacing them with new ones, we cannot afford... mostly from americans, buying gas at too-high prices... from americans, and getting deindustrialized and demilitarized in turn.
> ukraine is just another afghanistan mixed with cuba
No it’s not.
> inpenetrable defensive wall
modern conflicts don’t work that way. This was already useless as a deterrence prior to WW2 (a wall and having Germany have Czechoslovakia did sure protect France from an invasion didn’t it?)
Macron was the prime factor in that sale, and who it ended up benefiting remains to be seen. There is an open inquiry for corruption, embezzlement of public money and concealment. Protectionism is a foreign word to this man.
Also, GE bought a whole company for insane amounts of money, much more than it was worth, and EDF re-bought GE Steam Power later for basically nothing, and that was really all that mattered for nuclear reactors.
But on the other hand, the evidence presented to support these allegations seems awfully weak. For example, to make the claims work the author flags a list of people as being on "Team France" merely because they are French nationals, or in one case, merely because they happen to be on another board with someone who is a French national?
Weird, messy fights for control of public companies happens all the time; this doesn't even sound particularly interesting, even if the wildest claims being made are true.
Not sure if the author is just extremely naive, know there's nothing going on here but is trying to manufacture a controvery, or is just bad at writing and left out some key information. Whatever the case, I'm just left confused why I'm meant to care.
(Also, I'm more familiar with US finance. Maybe this really is unusual in France? Because poison pill provisions and standstill agreements and such are routine in the US. As are boards with power over things like, eg, issuing more shares.)