The French Government has thrown cold water on the privatisation of its biggest aerospace company, Aerospatiale, raising further questions about the planned merger with privately owned Dassault Aviation.
Defence minister Alain Richard has made it clear that Aerospatiale will remain in state hands, and that Dassault Aviation will be expected to toe the line and merge to form an aeronautics "pole" around which other European manufacturers can regroup. The statement comes after the Government's change of heart about defence-electronics giant Thomson-CSF, which it now confirms will be privatised.
"The Government hopes to convince Dassault Aviation that the forces [of the two companies] can be combined while maintaining Aerospatiale in the public sector," Richard told Le Monde on 24 July.
In what has been taken as a thinly veiled threat to the Rafale fighter and Dassault Aviation president Serge Dassault, who has consistently made the privatisation of Aerospatiale a key condition of the merger, Richard adds that the Government would give "priority" to "totally harmonised" French and German arms purchases, saying that "-we are studying the development of certain programmes".
The Government's move will revive arguments about the respective valuations of the two companies, and about plans for the incorporation of the future entity into whatever grouping results from the sell-off of a majority stake in Thomson-CSF. Details of the Dassault-Aerospatiale merger were well advanced before the recent general election.
Source: Flight International
