STEEL tycoon Lakshmi Mittal was to tackle a French nationalisation threat in talks with President Francois Hollande on Tuesday (November 27) as the finance minister defended the country’s credentials as a safe investment location.
Forty lawmakers from Hollande’s Socialist party said they were in favour of temporarily nationalising ArcelorMittal’s plant in Florange just before a key meeting between the president and the India-born billionaire.
“Mittal does not respect our country,” a joint statement by the parliamentarians said, adding that his interests “were clearly not that of France, of its industrial fabric and its workers.”
“We think that protecting 2,500 jobs in a profitable site in a region that has sadly been affected for a long time by the crisis must be a priority,” the statement added.
Mittal, who ranks 21st on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, is locked in a battle with France over the future of the Florange site in the traditional, but declining, heartland of the French steel industry in the eastern Lorraine region.
He is due to meet Hollande at 1700 GMT.
Hollande’s government has made a priority of protecting jobs as it seeks to revive France’s struggling economy.
ArcelorMittal has said that two blast furnaces at Florange, which were damped down for 14 months prior to their full closure, were uncompetitive in a tough trading climate, partly because they are too far from ports for transportation.
The company gave the government two months, which expires on Saturday (November 24), to find a buyer for them. The government says it has two offers, but only for the entire Florange site including other facilities which Mittal wants to retain and keep operating.
Mittal has refused to sell the full operation and warned that nationalisation of the Florange facilities would threaten the viability of all of its activities across France, where it employs 20,000 people.
French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici meanwhile tried to limit the damage to investor perceptions after Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg threatened to nationalise Florange and said ArcelorMittal was no longer welcome in France.
“Everyone can understand that this case is a special one,” he said.
“We of course welcome investors on our soil,” Moscovici added, stressing that only a temporary nationalisation had been envisaged so far.
Montebourg, who is suggesting that the state nationalise Florange so as to pass the entire site on to a buyer, raised the stakes on Monday (November 26), saying France did not want ArcelorMittal in the country any more and was looking for a partner to take over the group’s operations at the plant.
“We do not want Mittal in France any longer because they do not respect France,” Montebourg told the French financial daily Les Echos.
“Mittal’s lies since 2006 are damning.”
But Montebourg later tempered his comments, saying he meant he did not want Mittal’s methods in France, accusing it of “non-respect of its commitments, blackmail and threats.”
Speaking to reporters while visiting a factory near Orleans, Montebourg confirmed a nationalisation was possible.
“A temporary public takeover is a perfectly reasonable option… because it costs nothing to the taxpayer and respects both French and European law,” he said.
London’s colourful mayor, Boris Johnson, meanwhile jumped into the fray, mocking France by saying that left-wing revolutionaries had taken control of the country and were driving investors away.
“I see the sans-culottes appear to have captured the government in Paris. The French minister has been so eccentric to call for a massive investment to depart from France.
“I have no hesitation in saying here, ‘Venez à Londres, mes amis!’ (Come to London, my friends),” he told a meeting of business leaders in New Delhi.
“Come to the business capital of the world,” Johnson added.
The “sans-culottes,” meaning “without knee breeches’, were the most militant supporters of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.
