Atomic Anne is angry
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 .5 billion. The acquisition had simply been badly managed, it said, leading Areva to overpay. Last December the company took a €1.46 billion ( 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. Areva’s head of mining, Sébastien de…
