Word: suez
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Earlier this year, the BBC unearthed some startling documents in the British National Archives. The papers, which dated back to the Suez crisis in 1956, documented a proposal by Guy Mollet, France's Socialist Prime Minister of the time, to create a union between France and Great Britain. When his British counterpart, the Conservative Anthony Eden, flatly rejected the idea, Mollet suggested that France could instead become a member of the British Commonwealth...
...city of Lyon. It was such a hit on the Paris stock market that the company soon spun off its own bank, Société Générale. Competing bank Crédit Lyonnais parried in 1880 with the creation of Lyonnaise des Eaux, which is the core of Suez's water business today. Though the direct links to those banks no longer exist, both companies have been key players in the roiling waters of French business and government ever since...
...Suez, of course, built the Suez Canal, but after the seaway was nationalized by Egypt in 1956, the company became largely a financial operator. It was nationalized in turn by the Socialist government of François Mitterrand in 1982, a disastrous move that was reversed in 1987, one year before the company got a big piece of Belgium's electricity industry through a merger with the Société Générale de Belgique. Lyonnaise, for its part, had been shorn of its gas and electricity assets by France's nationalization efforts in 1946. The two merged completely...
...urban Chinese," says Frérot. "The authorities have decided to commit as quickly as possible to improving their water and wastewater infrastructures." Veolia has 19 joint ventures in China, and Frérot says the company's short-term prospects there "look better than they do in the U.S." Suez has 21 ventures there after signing a deal to distribute water in Chongqing, China's fourth-largest city, with 32 million inhabitants...
...quality has its price, which is the reason Veolia and Suez can afford to be patient. "Those who advocate free water are wrong," says Suez's Chaussade. "We need to charge for water to avoid waste and deterioration of our natural resources. But this doesn't mean that everyone should pay the same price." The French giants of the industry can shrug and point out that it is not their task to set that price. That's up to markets and governments that want to regulate them to provide access to the poor, subsidize farmers or soak the rich...