French state bidding for piece of Atos, offers €700M

The French government has confirmed an offer of €700 million ($748 million) for key assets of ailing IT services giant Atos, following the company’s acceptance of a restructuring deal earlier this week. Atos, which has struggled with debt, declining revenue, and rising losses in recent years, said it received a non-binding …

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's been an eventful week for Atos, but certainly one where progress has been made,"

Well, progress towards the end of Atos. Shareholders have progressed to knowing their money is lost, creditors have progressed to knowing they have worthless new shares instead of bad debt, and the French government are making progress towards nationalising bits that are essential to national security.

Trebles all round.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about things in this counrty?

What I want to know is what the UK government is doing to safeguard all of the UK datacentres that Atos run that contain UK government IT services?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Presumably nothing as there's no functioning government at the moment. By most measures there hasn't been for a good many years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

It's par for the course I guess as France is having its very own Liz Truss moment as we speak ... government dissolution, snap elections (June 30, July 7). The prez was vexed when the French voted to massively send Putin-backed far-right Rassemblement National folks to the European Parliament, and reacted to it in contemporary UK-inspired fashion IMHO (a Cameron-like bet on what was then Brexit).

These are times that remind me of Camus' "The Plague", Ionesco's "Rhinoceros", and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", but fostered by the very substantial backing of a highly specific outsider ... (these are not good times)

[heyrick]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Yes, it was quite surreal to see Macron implying that he can trust the French to do the right thing and not put the far right into power.....on the evening of the day they voted to do just that.

Now his party want him to shut the hell up and sit in the corner quietly as they try to convince the voters that they're more than "you bastards are dismantling the sacrosanct social support system" (let's start with the undemocratic way of pushing through the rise in retirement age, and, and, and...).

Retirement rise was quite unpopular, and the way it was done without involving the parliament makes Macron potentially the most detested President in modern times, so, yeah, En Marche trying to tell the voters that they're good for the country probably ranks up there alongside Penny Mordaunt's suggestion that we should trust Sunak's record. Uh-huh.

Bring me the popcorn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Parliament was very much involved, and decided to not censor the government. It could very much have blocked the reform and decided not to.

Macron is far from being ths biggest user of Article 49.3 yet. And calling this article undemocratic is forgetting that it was actually voted in directly by the people, when they overwhelmingly voted in favor of the constitution of the 5th Republic.

There was democracy at all stages, but of course, it's always easy to cherry pick the bits that fit the desired narrative.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Well, for the 49.3, it was Rocard (Mitterand) and then Borne (Macron) outclassing all others (2.5x to 1) as shown in this Statista bar chart (red bars). And if this graph is to be believed, Borne's rate was 10 per year, beating Rocard's 9.33/year, giving cause for the street frogs' upset over this IMHO.

Still, it's bad news for Atos in my view: "who knows" what that €700M deal is worth now that the gov Liz-Trussed itself?

I can't understand the French voting approach on those EU elections that sparked the dissolution. The EU parliament is already 50+% Right-wing and Far-Right (since at least 1999), and one notes that the Right (PPE, biggest block) lost 8% to the Far-Right the same year that Russia invaded Crimea (coincidence?). This year, as interviewed Frenchies consistently expressed displeasure with EU policy and Macron (Center), you'd have expected them to vote massively for the Left (opposition) ... Not so!

The amphibians actually voted at 66.67% for the Center (Renew), Right (PPE), and Far Right (ID,ECR). Go figure!

[David Newall]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Calling people amphibians and frogs has no place in civilised society. Please leave your racial prejudice at the door.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

My guess is that the number of UK pubic sector systems hosted in Atos datacentres has been failling for several years. I don't know about Atos as a whole, but when I used to work for them I had the impression that customers were keen to move their systems out of Atos data centres and into public clouds.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Whilst you are probably right, I know of at least two government departments that still have current services hosted in Atos datacentres, and some systems that are too sensitive to be placed in the public cloud are still being moved into Atos datacentres from other locations.

I believe that Atos also run some private cloud infrastructure for UK Government departments.

[Roland6]

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Would not be surprised if the UK (government) data centres are part of ATOS the French government wish to take over; reasonably secure overseas revenue which can be used to fund French welfare and pensions…

[Missing Semicolon]

One rule....

I thought there were rules about state aid?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One rule....

There are, but similar to many EU directives, France is one of the countries that are prepared to ignore many of them (France is one of the worst offenders), and see who complains.

When the UK left the EU, these other countries lost one of their major critics, so are probably feeling emboldened to keep doing it.

(IMHO, the reason why Cameron was trying to play hard-ball with the EU and triggered the referendum was to try to change some of these worst practices in the EU. He got some [actually quite a lot] of concessions, but he pressed ahead with the vote anyway, not expecting to lose it, but expecting that a close result might put the fear up other countries in the EU. Backfired a bit, however. That was why he felt he had to go.)