Thales-Dassault: No defence for shareholders

The French government has managed to stiff the shareholders of not one, but two companies by engineering the sale of a 21% stake in Thales, the defence electronics group, to fighter planes maker Dassault Aviation. The seller, Franco-US telecom company Alcatel-Lucent, doesn’t get the price it could have extracted from another interested buyer. And Thales shareholders must take contend with a low valuation for their company. Worse, they will be robbed of a full bid. Alcatel-Lucent’s stake in Tha...