Atos Origin: Alone again

When companies suspend trading in their shares pending a statement, it is often a prelude to a deal being announced. Not so in the case of French IT services group Atos Origin. Its shares were suspended on Friday, but on Monday Atos was forced to admit that buyout talks over a possible sale of the company had failed. Atos’s shares promptly slumped by as much as 16%, to E45 a share. What went wrong? The official explanation is that Atos did not receive any binding offers within the allotted time...