Former Minister Arnaud Montebourg asks the government to “prohibit” the takeover by an American group of the French company Segault, a supplier for the French nuclear industry, and says he is ready to acquire it thanks to an alliance with a Investment Funds.
Segault, based in Mennecy (Essonne) and which indicates on its site that it employs 80 employees, notably supplies Naval Group, a French naval defense manufacturer, with valves for the nuclear boiler rooms that equip national nuclear submarines and the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. Its parent company, the Canadian company Velan, “is preparing to be acquired by OPA by Flowserve Corporation, an American multinational company”, indicates Arnaud Montebourg in a letter addressed to the Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire in dated March 31, which he transmitted to AFP.
Segault “is one of these sensitive companies in France within the defense industrial and technological base (BITD)”. The company “equips all our nuclear-powered military buildings, its activities are essential for national defence”, and “in addition, it equips all our nuclear power plants”, highlights the former Minister of Productive recovery, become an entrepreneur.
Protect technologies “transferable to a foreign government”
“It seems heavily prejudicial to the interests of our Nation” that Segault “passes under the control of Flowserve Corporation (…) We cannot accept that information concerning the technologies used by our nuclear submarines are potentially transmissible to a foreign government”, he writes, referring to the “Patriot Act”. This American law, adopted after the attacks of September 11, part of which has become obsolete, “allows the American government to request from any American company, without any judicial authorization or the slightest motivation, any information within the framework of unilateral investigations beyond all control, carried out by its external intelligence services, relating in particular to the activity of espionage”, he indicates.
He specifies that his own company founded in 2015, “Les Équipes du Made in France”, and the investment company Otium Capital, “have joined forces to launch a fund project, the Sovereign Private Fund for Industry and Agriculture” dedicated to industrial and agricultural sovereignty. Although the new company is still “in the process of being set up”, Montebourg defends that it is preferable, for French strategic interests, that it acquires Segault. “We are fully able to finance the acquisition,” he wrote again. In order to enter into negotiations with the current owners of Segault, the cantor of Made in France requests that Bercy notifies Floweserve of a purchase ban.