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Comment by Buetol | Hacker News Reader

FYI, that's what the US does already and big time. They racket companies with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, it has always been applied to foreign and strategic companies. Recently the U.S. even emprisoned a french just to put pressure and aquire Alstom, an extremely strategic french company [0] (nuclear reactor, trains,...)

So, EU fighting back doesn't suprise me !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Acquisition_by_General_...

A good source but in french: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dejeVuL9-7c

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FYI, that's what the US does already and big time. They racket companies with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, it has always been applied to foreign and strategic companies.

The FCPA just bans bribes and other crimes that are also illegal in the US. Most foreign companies do not get hit with FCPA violations. Just the ones that use bribes as a part of doing business.

Alstrom's not a great example, since they were also charged by the UK over their corrupt business practices.

The FPCA violations weren't levied on Alstrom to push through a US acquisition; the FCPA investigation began years before. And ultimately, GE only acquired a part of Alstrom, after competing bids from EU companies were blocked by the French government.

I don't see anywhere claiming the U.S emprisoned a French citizen to put pressure on this issue.

Oops, it's only in the french version, here's an article about that: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/-the-amer...

Are you seriously citing an opinion piece written by one of the executives that admitted to bribing foreign officials as evidence that the US applied pressure to push through a partial acquisition of the executive's former employer?

Most importantly--the details of the article cited in relation to the GE deal (i.e., the claims that the CEO pushed through the GE deal due to US pressure) ignore the fact that the French government was the one that ultimately blocked the competing EU bids, even though the company itself favored the Siemens bid.

It's an opinion piece about a book, the american trap, which is a demonstration of the US being the bully of the world and racketing every country which make more sense to me that the french government choosing the wrong deal by incompetence

Money had a large part to do with it. GM upped their bid after the Siemens offer and Siemens didn't respond in kind.

GM now admits they severely overpaid for the French company and in hindsight should have let Siemens buy it because the French assets they acquired were a serious drag on the performance of the post-acquisition GM Power subsidiary.

I guess that's why they are firing more than 1000 people right now in France, the people building nuclear reactor turbines. Or maybe because it's more strategic to produce those in the US so the french can be at their mercy, I don't know what makes the most sense. Especially since the US tried to bully France when they refused to go to Irak with them, they halted all military exports to France but we are independent enought that it didn't do any dommage.

Ridiculous

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