Word: vivendi
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...America is great, France is great. But they make a bad couple." Daniel Toscan du Plantier, president of Unifrance, on Vivendi's U.S. acquisitions...
Corporate Raiders In the latest twist in the Vivendi saga, French investigators launched a probe nto the indebted media company's accounts, seizing documents from its headquarters...
...economist Christian de Boissieu, "the situation confronting our telecom operators, who are all deep in debt, means that we're facing similar problems." To the well-known troubles of France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, add the pains at tech giant Alcatel. Or the fiasco at media and utilities conglomerate Vivendi, which soon after booting Jean-Marie Messier was seen scrambling for emergency funding to service j19 billion in borrowings. Could this spell the end of what the Germans call the Aktienkultur, or equity culture? Just a few short years ago, traditionally risk-averse European savers were piling into stocks...
Person of the Week CANCELLED He took Vivendi Universal on a corporate buying spree, trying to transform a staid, provincial French utilities firm into a multinational media giant. But Jean-Marie Messier overreached and Vivendi's stock price collapsed, leading to his dismissal as company chairman last week...
...Jacques Chirac advised disgruntled fans against turning on their beloved Bleus - warning "we mustn't burn today what we considered beautiful yesterday." Messier wasn't so lucky. Though once regarded as a national hero for turning a sleepy French water company into the world's second-largest media group, Vivendi Universal, Messier saw his corporate reign come to an ignoble end last week as the stock market and the French media, business and cultural élite - and even the Elysée itself - converged to oust him. In France, Messier's name is now close to dirt - which also approximates...