Spies and dodgy deals at France’s nuclear power giant AREVA

Anne Lauvergeon, former boss of AREVA, claims that the spying scandal is part of a long-running plot against her, orchestrated by a small group of people who oversee France’s nuclear-energy industry

Nuclear energy in France Fallout A tale of spies, uranium and bad management, The Economist Feb 18th 2012 | PARIS FANS of the cock-up theory of events got a boost
this week when Areva, a French nuclear-energy one-stop shop, said there had been no fraud in its disastrous purchase of UraMin, a Canadian start-up firm with mining assets in Namibia, the Central African Republic and South Africa, in 2007 for $2.5 billion. The acquisition had simply been badly managed, it said, leading Areva to overpay. Last December the company took a €1.46 billion ($2 billion) charge against the acquisition, resulting in a huge operating loss for 2011.

Areva had suspected a plot. It ordered an external study of the UraMin deal in 2010, which suggested dodgy goings-on. Then in 2011 it hired a Swiss private-detective agency, Alp Services, to investigate the circumstances of the transaction. Anne Lauvergeon, Areva’s boss at the time and France’s most prominent businesswoman, was not informed of the probe.

Last month she announced that her husband had been spied on by Alp Services, and on February 8th began a legal complaint against unidentified people…

….Ms Lauvergeon, who is nicknamed
“Atomic Anne”, has her own theory. She was fired as boss of Areva in
June 2011 when Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, decided not to
renew her mandate as boss of the state-owned group. She claims that
the spying scandal is part of a long-running plot against her,
orchestrated by a small group of people who oversee France’s
nuclear-energy industry. Mr de Montessus, she says, would never have
dared to order an investigation involving his boss without sanction
from higher up.

……Many observers will take Ms Lauvergeon’s statements as further
evidence of shadowy networks at the top of French business and
government. In “La Republique des Mallettes” (“Briefcase Republic”, a
reference to bags of cash), an investigative book published last year,
the author, Pierre Péan, describes feuds against Ms Lauvergeon before
her departure in 2011. The poor relationship between Ms Lauvergeon and
Mr Proglio is well-known and is thought to have been one of the
reasons why Mr Sarkozy replaced her.

But the scariest element of the story remains the UraMin deal itself,
for which Ms Lauvergeon is chiefly responsible. At the time, in 2007,
expectations of a nuclear renaissance caused uranium prices to soar.
Areva’s rivals were snapping up uranium deposits…..

On February 22nd judges will rule on whether the company was right to
suspend Ms Lauvergeon’s severance bonus, of €1.5m, pending the outcome
of its inquiry. Ms Lauvergeon’s spying case could throw up further
embarrassments for the firm. As the company struggles to sell nuclear
energy to a nuclearphobic world, more intrigue is the last thing it
needs. http://www.economist.com/node/21547812