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President Trump warned that France is at risk of a fresh trade war with America — declaring in an exclusive interview with The Post that unless Paris axes its digital tax on American tech giants, the US will “have no choice” but to slap 100% tariffs on French wines.

Trump said he gave the blunt warning directly to outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron, demanding he ditch the 3% tech levy or face devastating duties in the American market, which accounts for a fifth of the French wine industry’s global sales — worth more than $2 billion annually.

“I asked him not to charge American companies, and if they do, I have no choice but to charge a 100% tariff on all champagnes and all wines coming out of France,” Trump told The Post. “All [Macron] has to do is get rid of the sales tax, and he wouldn’t have that kind of pressure.”

The ultimatum sets the stage for a bitter showdown at Monday’s G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, the annual meeting of seven of the world’s wealthiest democracies to set the rules on global trade, security, and economic policy that helps move markets.

His comments also shatter claims made last week by Macron’s office, the Élysée Palace, that the two nations had quietly settled their long-running spat over taxing Silicon Valley.

A senior source close to the French president told reporters last week that the issue was “no longer up for debate” amongst G7 countries — an account a US official immediately dismissed as “not accurate.”

France’s digital services tax, commonly known as the GAFAM tax, has been on the books since 2019. It imposes a sweeping 3% levy on the local revenue generated by the likes of Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Apple.

Because the policy targets gross revenue rather than profits, it hits US tech titans the hardest, raking in roughly $700 million last year alone according to the French finance ministry.

The pressure intensified in October when France’s deeply divided National Assembly, the country’s answer to the House of Representatives, voted 296-58 to double the tax to 6% and narrow the threshold to exclusively target the largest global players. The move was eventually vetoed by ministers.

Lawmakers had even originally floated a punitive 15% hike before scaling it back under industry pressure. Then-Economy Minister Roland Lescure warned at the time that a “disproportionate” tax would invite “disproportionate” American reprisals.

That reprisal is now taking shape. Trump’s latest threat revives the punishing 100% tariff level first proposed by the US Trade Representative during a 2019 investigation into the French tax.

While Macron has previously been dubbed a “Trump whisperer” capable of cutting deals with the billionaire real estate mogul — including an eleventh-hour truce at the 2019 G7 in Biarritz — the Trump administration is now taking a harder line globally.

Aside from this year’s hosts France and the United States, the other G7 countries Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the UK.

When approached for comment, White House spokesman Kush Desai pointed The Post to a presidential memo from February 2025 stating that American businesses would no longer “prop up failed foreign economies through extortive fines and taxes.”

The memo tasked US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and the Treasury Department with deciding whether to reopen a formal probe into the French levy. Neither department responded to requests for comment.

France’s aggressive tax hike isolates it from several key allies who have bowed to Washington’s pressure. Canada shelved its own digital tax in 2025 after the US broke off trade talks, and Italy is reportedly weighing a repeal of its levy.

Britain, however, has retained its digital services tax under its current trade arrangements with America.

The G7 (Group of Seven) summit runs until Wednesday in the French lakeside town of Evian.

The club of the world’s seven largest so-called “advanced” economies, which dominate global trade and the international financial system, includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the United States.

Russia joined in 1998, creating the G8, but was excluded after it seized Crimea. China has never been a member, despite its large economy and having the world’s second-largest population

What do you do when your brokerage firm notifies you that you can get in on the deal of the century, the initial public offering of Elon Musk’s SpaceX?

For me, it was easy: Ignore it.

Mind you, the note was enticing. I was offered a “one-day indication of interest,” a window where I could tell the firm I wanted a piece of the AI-satellite-and-rocket conglomerate that aims to colonize Mars. Then, if I was lucky, I could get stock at the IPO price as opposed to the “pop” that comes after the deal is priced at $135 a share.

One problem: I’m a reporter who covers such stocks. I don’t buy individual shares because I can move prices and I don’t want to end up like Andrew Left, the famed short seller who just got convicted of stock manipulation in California.

The bigger problem: If this thing is so great, why come to me?

OK — I’m not quite the bottom of the barrel when it comes to investors; I am a “qualified investor,” which means I have enough savings to meet certain risk thresholds the SEC imposes on such stock sales. But if you know those limits, you also know that I didn’t make this year’s who’s who on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

SpaceX was the largest IPO ever. Musk & Co. raised $75 billion and the market valued SpaceX at more than $2 trillion. The deal was supposed to be so sought-after by the “smart money,” it was designated as four times “oversubscribed,” Wall Street parlance for more buyers than sellers.

And yet I have my doubts about the quality of the oversubscription and how long the pop in the stock will last. That’s when the irrational exuberance wears off and shares crater, as they so often do with these “hot IPOs.” The PR offensive to drum up interest had been going on for weeks, with lots of touting that everyone wants in on the next new thing. It picked up steam Thursday when the offering price was set to begin trading on Friday.

What scares me is that it was also targeting the so-called “dumb money,” aka retail investors like me who are easy prey for Wall Street dealmakers and hedge fund flippers when they sell after the spike.

Look at the continued allure of meme stocks, companies with suspect balance sheets that online investors push as the next Apple and Amazon. Some have folded, others have crashed after the irrational exuberance of 2021, and all are well off their highs. Yet, the meme community still exists, hoping to make it big on some miracle when they would have been better off keeping whatever they had in the bank.

SpaceX isn’t a meme stock — far from it — but at least some of the same dynamics apply. Yes, Musk has a lengthy track record defying critics and swarms of short sellers predicting the demise of Tesla. The electric-car maker is now a $1.27 trillion company and among the market’s best performers, up over 30,000% since its IPO years back.

Musk himself was also worth more than $1 trillion after the ­SpaceX IPO started trading Friday — and more power to him. We need to reward visionary entrepreneurs who create stuff, making our lives better and more prosperous. Musk built his wealth; he weathered ups and downs along the way — and he produced. Tesla is profitable and it wasn’t always. It took him years to convince Wall Street he wasn’t a fugazy.

But that’s not the point of this column. The financials of SpaceX may or may not follow the same trajectory as Tesla. AI is the future, but so was the internet. Recall all those dot-coms that soared in price after their IPOs only to crash and burn when it came time to produce real earnings.

Last year SpaceX lost nearly $5 billion after turning a small profit in 2024 as it began to build out its AI infrastructure that is supposed to be the glue that holds this disparate conglomerate together.

It also might be worth looking at what this company does. Yes, it sends rockets to space and yes, it does operate satellites for broadband usage. And yes, this will be powered by AI, Musk’s company xAI, to be precise. Buried inside this company is also the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, which for all Elon’s headcount shaving still isn’t believed to be profitable.

Maybe this will work, although I’m not sure. There’s also the question of when it will work. On Friday, the IPO went great out of the gate; underwriters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the best in the business and they know how to work their book of investors.

There will be hedge funds and other savvy trading types who got in on the offering price, who will flip on the pop. Some smart people on Wall Street also believe shares will drop some 20% over the coming months because that’s how these things work.

I’m also pretty sure the underwriters know all of the above, which is why retail investors (like myself) got that call last week.

The voracious appetite by companies to buy back their shares this millennium has overwhelmed any equity issuance by them.

However, the resulting two-decade drought in US stock supply could end soon. A trio of blockbuster IPOs from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI is set to flood the market, threatening to test the absolute limits of investor demand.

This wave comes just as Wall Street’s tech titans launch multibillion-dollar share sales to bankroll their massive AI build-outs. It marks a dramatic U-turn from the era of heavy share repurchases that helped US stocks more than triple since 2016.

Goldman Sachs estimates net supply of equity in the US — measured by new shares hitting the market less equity removed by buybacks or companies going private — will be almost flat in 2026, having been in negative territory since 2003. The bank expects an even greater influx of new shares in 2027, as lock-up periods on this year’s IPOs expire, write Kate Duguid and Emily Herbert.

Without the tailwind of a shrinking supply of shares, some analysts and investors worry Wall Street’s tech-led rally could finally run out of steam.

“This is a sea change,” said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, global chair of research at Barclays, referring to AI spending that is leaving little room for buybacks and turning some of the biggest companies in the US into net equity issuers.

Sixty US companies have gone public this year, raising nearly $40bn, the highest year-to-date deal value since 2021, according to data from Dealogic that excludes listings of blank-cheque companies. Goldman expects that figure to rise to a record $225bn this year following the raft of big listings.

Some fund managers warn that a flurry of fundraising has in the past often accompanied the top of the market, as company insiders rush to sell their shares at elevated valuations and markets buckle under the weight of new shares.

“Record new issues is one of the classic signs of a bubble,” said Richard Bernstein, global head of macro investing at Janus Henderson Investors. “The new big three IPOs will dwarf the entire amount raised during the [1999-2000] tech bubble even when accounting for inflation.”

How Wall Street pulled off the biggest IPO in history for SpaceX

Bankers convinced investors to believe in a sci-fi strategy, overlook steep losses and hand full control to Elon Musk

Until well after midnight on Wednesday, bankers huddled in a room on the 41st floor of Goldman Sachs’ New York office portioning out the most sought-after initial public offering in history.

With Elon Musk looming over proceedings by video, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell and chief financial officer Bret Johnsen combed through orders at the top of the book, reallocating oversubscribed shares among Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and the biggest US institutions.

More than 20 investors received billion-dollar-plus chunks of the deal, 10 times the previous record for any IPO, people familiar with the matter told the FT. 

Earlier in the day, investors had cycled through Goldman’s office petitioning for a share of a deal they knew was likely to pop when it started trading on Friday, netting anchor investors tens of millions in instant profit.

As they made their case, they munched on pastries from French chef Dominique Ansel, including custom SpaceX-branded versions of his famous “Cronut”, a croissant-doughnut hybrid.

That day capped a gruelling six-month process that has seen bankers from Goldman led by Kim Posnett and Dan Dees and Morgan Stanley’s Kate Claassen and Colin Stewart decamp to SpaceX’s offices in Hawthorne, near Los Angeles, staying in hotel rooms and renting Airbnbs.

They worked side by side with SpaceX staff on a vast open floor, not far from where the group builds its Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft. Drafts of the prospectus were sent up to senior SpaceX executives, including vice-president of finance Majla Custo, who weighed in before Musk’s final sign-off.

Together they plotted how to pull off the largest IPO in history, which required investors to believe in a sci-fi strategy, overlook steep losses, stomach an unprecedented valuation and hand total control to a controversial and mercurial founder.

Bankers led tours of its vast launch site in Texas to see its skyscraper-sized reusable Starship rocket. A 200,000-word prospectus laid out the vision: Martian colonies, electromagnetic lunar catapults, asteroid mining and orbital AI data centres.

They commissioned glossy promotional videos and wrapped them together in a website to whip up retail demand from Musk’s army of online fans.

By Friday’s open it was clear they had succeeded. SpaceX raised $75bn and secured a valuation in excess of $2tn. Now the syndicate stands to collect $500mn, the highest fee ever paid on a public offering.

This is the story of how they did it, based on interviews with multiple advisers on the deal.

“There’s no better builder than Elon and SpaceX,” said one banker involved. “There’s no other company that can turn fiction into fact.”

The roadshow officially kicked off on June 4. Musk, always his companies’ biggest cheerleader, peppered his 240mn followers on social media platform X with SpaceX content.

The entrepreneur joined a marquee launch event at JPMorgan’s headquarters by video for a discussion with Jamie Dimon.

More than 300 investors packed into a hall on the 51st floor of its 270 Park Avenue headquarters, streaming the event to branches nationwide and on social media.

Rockets blasted off with sound effects by the elevators, moon rocks sat in one corner, and analysts in white SpaceX jumpsuits showed investors to their seats. George Lucas sent along books filled with Star Wars art. 

“This is more like Woodstock than an IPO,” said attendee Dylan Hixon of Arden Road Investments. “We chatted about mining on the moon.” 

On stage, Dimon, who has had a rocky relationship with Musk in the past, praised him as the “Edison of our time” and let the SpaceX chief lay out the case for backing the rocket maker.

Musk described the “self-growing city on the Moon” he hoped to build, while calling Mars, which has almost no atmosphere, a “fixer-upper of a planet” with “a lot of potential”.

Bankers and SpaceX executives next flew to Boston to meet large US mutual funds such as Fidelity and Wellington before jetting across the country for more investor meetings at SpaceX’s Hawthorne offices on Monday.

As Musk and his bankers combed through the order book on Wednesday night, they assessed who would be committed long-term owners and weeded out those most likely to dump the stock for a quick profit.

They handed about 70 per cent of the offering to long-only managers, sovereign wealth funds and longtime Musk friends, with retail handed a further 20 per cent of the pie. Hedge funds were squeezed down to about 10 per cent of the book.

The chief investment officer of a small US hedge fund said SpaceX’s bankers had taken the unusual step of asking for proof that his fund had enough cash for the tens of millions of dollars of stock it had requested. 

“The banks are saying ‘no, we want to see the cash in your account first’. I’ve done dozens of IPOs and I’ve never been asked that before,” the CIO said. The fund was eventually allocated about $80mn of shares, having bid for $200mn.

SpaceX’s employees past and present have also been anxiously awaiting the IPO. The extreme increase in the group’s valuation, up from $400bn just under a year ago, has made thousands of them millionaires overnight. 

Former staff kept close track of the company’s prospects in a chat group on WhatsApp called “Stonks”. Participants have spent much of the IPO process in disbelief at their good fortune, according to one member of the chat. 

“The SpaceX mafia is gonna make [the ‘PayPal mafia’ of Musk, Peter Thiel and others] look tiny by comparison,” said David Anderman, an investor who served as SpaceX’s general counsel until 2020. “There will be a lot of very wealthy millionaires” looking to start their own companies.

The IPO also sparked jubilation in Silicon Valley, where a host of blue-chip venture firms such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and 137 Ventures have realised billions of dollars in gains. 

“It’s an exciting moment and a culmination of a lot of work by the company,” said Christian Garrett, a partner at 137 Ventures, one of SpaceX’s earliest backers with a 1 per cent stake. “SpaceX is a great testament to entrepreneurship in America — it was started to bring launch capacity back from Russia and has built from there.”

But the biggest single beneficiary is Antonio Gracias, a Musk loyalist for two decades who amassed close to 7 per cent of SpaceX’s class A shares via his investment firm Valor Equity Partners and 29 affiliated entities. His reward is a stake worth about $81bn.

Goldman and Morgan Stanley were the winners among the 22 banks on the deal. They each took $100mn from the $500mn fee pool, by far the largest IPO windfall ever, while Bank of America, JPMorgan and Citi each raked in about $75mn.

One banker speculated the $500mn fee was possibly calculated with 0.67 per cent of the float in a reference to the “six-seven” meme popular online, keeping with Musk’s penchant for jokes.

Goldman in particular had been courting Musk and SpaceX for almost two decades, according to people familiar with their strategy. The bank’s persistence paid off when it trumped longstanding Musk adviser Michael Grimes of Morgan Stanley to win the coveted “lead left” role and the associated bragging rights.

Befitting the largest IPO of all time, the seniority of the bankers personally running aspects of the deal was notable. Posnett, Goldman’s co-head of investment banking, led the draft of the S-1 prospectus in December, alongside head of equity capital markets David Ludwig, their boss Dan Dees and senior adviser Susie Scher.

They immediately started sounding out large investors at the World Economic Forum in Davos after being challenged by Musk to meet a tight deadline. The notoriously demanding billionaire insisted on timing the IPO to coincide with a rare planetary conjunction in early June.

The advisers endured numerous distractions and had to redraft the prospectus multiple times. SpaceX completed a $1.25tn merger with his lossmaking start-up xAI in February, it then agreed a $60bn option to buy AI coding start-up Cursor in April and in recent weeks struck two massive deals with AI lab Anthropic and Google to rent out its computing power.

Despite these hurdles, the bankers hit their target, taking SpaceX public the same week that Mercury, Venus and Jupiter aligned in the night sky.

There were other unique aspects. Unusually for an IPO there was no price or size range to allow flexibility on the day, with Musk deciding that SpaceX would sell 555.6mn shares at $135 each no matter what.

“Elon didn’t want to do a kabuki dance with the pricing. It was not just a finger stuck in the air, he listened to investors and then said: ‘This is my price, if they buy, they buy,’” said one banker on the deal, referring to the highly stylised Japanese dance.

“Take it or leave it: there is one person in the world who could do it like that and it is Elon,” the person added.

His gamble paid off. The deal was three times subscribed and SpaceX closed the day up 19 per cent, making it the world’s sixth-largest company and Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

“With any IPO you want to leave people wanting more,” said a lead banker on the deal. “That’s the art of the job. That’s how you make sure it opens up.”

Trading kicked off in a carnival-like atmosphere at Morgan Stanley’s offices on Friday afternoon. 

Led by Morgan Stanley’s veteran trader John Paci, a one-time backup quarterback for the New York Jets, bankers wore custom green trainers at Musk’s behest, in reference to a “greenshoe” option to raise an additional $11bn.

Goldman’s lead equity trader Benny Adler reflected the bombastic mood by giving a speech to the hundreds who gathered on its trading floor. 

“In 1969 we put a man on the moon,” he shouted. “Now let’s go to Mars!”

Revival of interest in nuclear power gives hope to start-ups

Investment in both fission and fusion suggests attitudes are changing

Forty years since the meltdown of Reactor 4 in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl in 1986, the world is experiencing what analysts have called a “nuclear renaissance”.

Targets to reach net zero carbon emissions coupled with the ever-increasing power demand from data centres have prompted Morgan Stanley to predict that global nuclear capacity will more than double by 2050 and that investments in the nuclear value chain will reach $2.2tn.

Meanwhile, executive orders signed by US President Donald Trump have committed to expanding American nuclear energy capacity from 100 to 400 gigawatts by 2050, and to having 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.

“Trump’s executive orders tear down decades of sclerosis in the nuclear sector in America. It was the firing gun for what some people are calling the nuclear renaissance,” says Will Dufton, a partner at venture capital firm Giant Ventures in London.

In Europe, too, attitudes towards nuclear energy are changing. Nuclear power already generates roughly a quarter of the bloc’s total energy and half of its carbon-free power. In 2023, the Nuclear Alliance of Member States set a target of 150GW of nuclear capacity across the EU by 2050 in a push for cheaper, cleaner power and energy sovereignty.

Dufton joined Giant Ventures in 2024 to lead second-round investment in start-ups in Europe and the US that were looking to scale up, and immediately began looking at the nuclear sector. “I felt like there was a shift happening, spearheaded by AI. The US is in a race against China to get to artificial intelligence supremacy, and energy is the bottleneck,” he says.

Giant Ventures led the investment into Los Angeles-based Radiant, which manufactures one-megawatt nuclear microreactors for use by the US military in remote locations. In May 2025, Radiant raised $165mn in third-round funding and six months later an additional $300mn, bringing its total value to more than $1.8bn.

“We got very lucky,” Dufton says of the deal.

For decades, nuclear innovation has been held back by the historic disasters in the sector: Chernobyl, in 1986, and Fukushima, in 2011. But more recently, the wars in Ukraine and Iran have forced fossil fuel prices up and disrupted energy supply chains, pushing governments towards reliable, low-cost sources of energy and to reconsider nuclear power.

The UK government, for example, promised in March to speed up the construction of nuclear power stations, following recommendations in a review by John Fingleton, former head of the Office of Fair Trading.

The Radiant deal is just one example of where geopolitical shifts are filtering down into nuclear technology and innovation. TerraPower, founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has raised $1.7bn with backers including chip giant Nvidia. The company is making small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which are easily transportable and designed for use in the field.

But while SMRs are attracting considerable investment, they still produce nuclear waste and are yet to be tested at scale, or tested at all outside war zones. These, and all nuclear power plants, use nuclear fission — the splitting of a heavy, unstable atom into smaller ones — which carries the risk of the reaction getting out of hand (as in Chernobyl).

Meanwhile, nuclear fusion is also attracting European and American venture capital investors. The process, where two light atoms combine to form a heavier one, poses no risk of meltdown and produces no radioactive waste.

Supporters of nuclear fusion say it is a theoretically totally limitless and safe energy source. Yet if it becomes a reality, it would be decades in the future and the technology is, at present, unproven.

That has not stopped investors. Founded in 2023, German start-up Proxima Fusion has raised €200mn to build a Stellarator Model Coil (SMC) in 2027, the first step towards building a functioning fusion power plant.

Another company, Helion Energy, raised $425mn in a late stage funding round last year from investors including SoftBank and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

“There was always this strong backlash against fission, which was politically driven, but fusion seems like the Holy Grail: clean and abundant energy,” says Sebastian Becker, general partner at Redalphine, a European venture capital firm that was a seed investor in Proxima Fusion.

While Europe and the US pour money into the sector, China is estimated to have spent as much as $6.5bn on commercially viable fusion projects since 2023 alone.

“China is building fusion cities, entire cities focused on developing this technology,” says Peter Roos, chief executive of Novatron Fusion Group in Stockholm. “They are pushing the limits. They don’t have the technology yet but they are definitely doing all they can to make it happen. They want to be the first.”

eToro exploring acquisitions amid push into traditional banking services

Digital trading platform could apply for banking licence

eToro is eyeing multiple acquisitions and plotting an expansion into traditional payments services that could see it apply for banking licences.

The Nasdaq-listed trading firm is working with investment bankers to buy two businesses “soon” according to the group’s chief executive and co-founder Yoni Assia. 

Assia said the intended targets were wealth-technology businesses, with one in the US and another elsewhere.

“We are very acquisitive — it is part of the reason why we listed,” Assia told the FT in an interview. “We have a number of potential deals we are looking at including businesses who would help us grow our wealth offering. We remain committed to growing our global footprint including expanding the US market,” he added. The CEO would not be drawn on the size of the intended acquisitions.

eToro, which was founded in 2007 and allows users to trade commodities, stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets, also struck a deal in April to buy the crypto company Zengo for $70mn.

Assia expects further deals in the fintech sector, which has faced funding constraints because of the rise in interest rates. “There is going to be a big wave of consolidation . . . not all businesses will be able to exist as independent public businesses,” he said during the Money2020 conference. “There are founders here who have been doing the same thing for 20 years.”

The plans come as digital trading platforms seek to diversify their streams of income so that their share prices are more resilient to movements in the prices of cryptocurrencies and other assets. Since listing in May 2025, eToro’s share price has fallen nearly 40 per cent.

Assia said the group had started expanding into more traditional banking services so the company would be more hedged in asset movements. “The key is for diversification into more payments services . . . and that could see us consider applying for banking licences in the future, or buying a bank,” Assia said. He added this would be less around lending and more for payments functions. 

Recently, there has been a flurry of fintechs applying for American banking licences after a significant loosening of the rules to become a chartered lender by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency under the Trump administration. Revolut and Brazilian giant Nubank have applied for charters. Under the Biden administration, banking charters were harder to come by so some firms considered buying a lender as a workaround.

That option has become less attractive as the path to becoming a licensed bank has become easier. Last year, there were 14 applications to the OCC — many from fintechs — for a de novo charter to become a limited-purpose national trust bank, according to data from law firm Freshfields. That was almost as many as the total for the preceding four years. 

Assia said any movements towards licensing could be in the US or elsewhere.

eToro generated $216mn in net income in 2025, a 12 per cent increase on the previous year.

SFR’s €20bn break-up can win watchdog approval, says Bouygues

Lead bidder for French telecoms operator hopes EU’s competitive drive will offset regulatory concerns about merger

A €20bn deal to break up billionaire Patrick Drahi’s indebted French telecoms operator SFR can win regulatory approval, according to the CEO of lead bidder Bouygues, in a major test of Europe’s drive to increase its competitiveness by allowing more scale.

The consortium led by Bouygues, alongside rivals Orange and Iliad, wants to carve up SFR and reduce the number of telecoms operators in France from four to three — a traditional no-go for European watchdogs.

The operators hope that increased urgency to invigorate the bloc’s economy will favour them and offset regulators’ historical reticence to accept mergers that could lead to higher prices for consumers. 

“We think there’s a path to do it . . . two or three years ago, I wouldn’t have said that,” Bouygues chief executive Olivier Roussat told the FT, adding that regulators appeared increasingly willing to question the “dogma” that four operators were needed. 

He argued that price wars in France — sparked by Drahi to pressure rivals into a deal — had sapped operators’ ability to invest in upgrading networks, making consolidation imperative. “I’m not saying it has a 100 per cent chance [of success], but I think we have a better chance of succeeding than failing.”

After months of fraught negotiations among the French telecos, the deal terms call for Bouygues to pay about 42 per cent of the €20.35bn price to take the largest chunk of SFR’s customers, while Iliad will pay about 31 per cent and Orange 27 per cent. Chunky break-up fees as well as a substantial earnout for Drahi are also included.

One EU antitrust official said the transaction would be among the first major tests of forthcoming merger guidelines that put greater emphasis on innovation, investment and economic resilience.

“Things are moving in that direction [but] it’s not finalised yet. As of yet you don’t have any legal precedent” under the new guidelines, Roussat said. He pointed to the UK’s approval of the £16.5bn Vodafone-Three merger in 2024 as an example that attitudes towards telecom consolidation were shifting.

Former competition official Jonathan Faull said the European Commission would prefer cross-border rather than national consolidation. However, operators have long been uninterested in such deals since they do not deliver profit boosts or cost savings and few in the industry expect that to change. “There is no economy of scale given the lack of a single market in telecom,” Faull admitted. 

Brussels is preparing a shift in its competition policy, with draft guidelines published in April that put greater emphasis on the benefits of corporate scale, innovation and resilience.

The new guidelines are a key element of Brussels’ attempt to make the bloc more competitive in the wake of rivals such as the US and China. Telecoms companies were among the sectors most vocal about the need for greater scale in the guidelines.

It is not yet clear whether Paris or Brussels will take the lead on scrutinising the SFR deal, which is expected to close in the second half of 2027. Orange and Bouygues will file their submissions in France in the coming weeks, while Iliad will file in Brussels because of its broader European business.

Roussat said the substantive rules were the same in either forum, but dealing with French regulators could prove simpler and faster logistically as the companies are based in Paris. 

Roussat, who previously led Bouygues Telecom before taking over the group from 2021, has reason for caution. In 2022 French regulators rejected a proposed takeover of Bouygues-owned broadcaster TF1 with smaller rival M6, which is owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann. “We were really burned because . . . we truly thought it would be allowed,” he said. 

Given the rise of streaming services, the companies argued that the watchdog should broaden its scope to include digital advertising, not just television ads, but they disagreed. If that view evolved, Roussat said the group could rekindle takeover talks: “It would be interesting for TF1 to position itself on M6.”

Bertelsmann chief Thomas Rabe last year told the FT he hoped to revisit the idea of merging France’s two largest privately owned TV networks.

On SFR, the French competition watchdog has reminded the companies that approval had not been granted. The authority’s president, Benoît Coeuré, told Le Monde this week that the companies would need to demonstrate the deal’s “verifiable and, if possible, quantifiable” benefits, including for consumers. 

“It’s not a given . . . but if we had already concluded that reducing the number of operators in the French market from four to three was necessarily anti-competitive, we would have said so, and we wouldn’t have let the operators exhaust themselves trying to reach an agreement,” Coeuré said.

Approving the SFR deal could lead to further consolidation across Europe.

Roussat argues that years of fragmented markets and aggressive price competition have weakened Europe’s telecom sector and set back the region’s tech sector compared with the US and China.

“At some point, we have to say, be careful, because what’s happening is actually becoming dangerous. We mustn’t have a system where, ultimately, we end up with . . . nothing left in Europe,” he said. 

Milanese magic: how UniCredit won support for its lowball Commerzbank bid

Tender offer tactics used by investment banker Andrea Orcel deliver latest twist in 21-month takeover battle

When UniCredit’s tender offer for Commerzbank closes on Tuesday, it will mark a milestone in one of the most contentious bids in German takeover history — and not just because management and the German government vehemently oppose it.

As well as warring over strategy and the bid premium, the two banks have been fighting over how Andrea Orcel’s bank has so far managed to secure the support of 11.86 per cent of Commerzbank shareholders during the six-week offer period.

In conjunction with its previous direct stake of 26.77 per cent and 3.22 per cent of share-settled derivatives, the Italian bank now controls more than 41 per cent of Commerzbank’s equity, well above the 30 per cent threshold it wanted to cross. 

At face value — and based on Friday’s closing prices — those investors have voluntarily tendered at a discount, as the value of the UniCredit shares offered in exchange is below that at which Commerzbank’s equity now trades.  

That has prompted finger-pointing by Commerzbank, which has urged Germany’s financial watchdog BaFin to investigate what it describes as “unusual tender behaviour”, which has the potential to misrepresent the popularity of Orcel’s bid.

Commerzbank chief executive Bettina Orlopp has argued that, as of last week, no institutional investor and only a tiny fraction of retail shareholders accepted the offer. On Friday, the German bank’s workers’ council decided to file a criminal complaint over the tender behaviour with prosecutors, directed against “unknown perpetrators”.

According to documents seen by the FT, the bulk of the shares tendered come from banks that are UniCredit counterparties in complex derivatives trades linked to the Italian lender’s takeover attempt, including Nomura and Citigroup.

But even so, UniCredit has rebuffed Commerzbank’s complaints.

It said: “UniCredit’s offer process and disclosures fully comply with the law and are clear and indisputable. 

“Any confusion in the market is caused by Commerzbank’s repeated and unsubstantiated claims, which in an effort to obfuscate the merits of the transaction, have created uncertainty and risk to market integrity by obscuring already disclosed facts rather than clarifying them.”

The clash shows how, despite efforts by Orlopp to calm the waters this month, the fight for the future of Commerzbank remains fractious 21 months after UniCredit first acquired its surprise stake.

At the core of the latest dispute is a string of derivative contracts entered into by UniCredit and linked to Commerzbank shares.

In its offer document published on May 5, UniCredit disclosed 2.66 per cent of cash-settled total return swaps on Commerzbank’s shares. Subsequent disclosures show that figure had risen to 13.19 per cent by last week.

While UniCredit cannot demand the delivery of Commerzbank shares based on these contracts, its counterparties have committed to replicate the economic performance of Commerzbank’s stock. If the German lender’s shares go up, or the bank pays its dividend, the counterparties will pay the change in value to UniCredit. If the stock goes down, UniCredit must cover the difference. 

The UniCredit chief executive and former investment banker has form for his canny use of derivatives. Orcel used them heavily in 2024 to quickly report a 21 per cent stake in Commerzbank even before UniCredit had secured the necessary approval from the European Central Bank to raise its stake above 10 per cent.

While the counterparties for its latest derivatives have not been disclosed, Nomura and Citi were named in the offer document as counterparties for earlier total return swaps, and Nomura disclosed a position of more than 8 per cent shortly after UniCredit started the tender offer. Both Citi and Nomura declined to comment.

According to people familiar with the matter, the underlying asset in at least some of UniCredit’s new total return swaps is not publicly listed Commerzbank shares, but the tendered line.

Legally, every share that is offered to UniCredit becomes a different security and gets a different asset identifier to tell them apart. Both tendered and untendered Commerzbank shares are listed and can be traded, with the difference that once the tender offer completes, the tendered shares automatically convert into UniCredit shares.

Total return swaps on a tendered line of shares are a rare but not entirely unusual feature of tender offers in Germany, according to a banker who specialises in total return swaps but is not involved in the UniCredit deal.

Counterparties of total return swaps hedge their exposure either by buying the underlying asset or by entering synthetic hedges. Insiders who analysed the tender activities and Commerzbank’s share registry said shares tendered by Nomura and other UniCredit counterparties were likely to be linked to the hedging activity of those banks. 

“From the outside it is barely possible really to tell what is going on as the various TRS contracts and hedging agreements are complex and bespoke,” Thomas Schweppe, a former Goldman Sachs banker and founder of Frankfurt-based advisory firm 7 Square, told the FT.

“This dispute shows the shortcomings of German takeover rules and disclosure regulation,” he said, adding that transparency of derivative and swap structures under German law “is insufficient”.

BaFin, which declined to comment, has not publicly addressed Commerzbank’s concerns. But the watchdog has pressed UniCredit to broaden its disclosure on its short positions related to Commerzbank, according to people familiar with the matter.

As a consequence, the bank now reports that “more than 98 per cent” of its Commerzbank stake is hedged. Its disclosure about total return swaps is unchanged. 

Orlopp remains open to a deal if UniCredit comes back with a more attractive offer, according to one person familiar with her thinking. She said at an investor conference earlier this month that the Italian bank would need to increase the premium on offer and safeguard the German lender’s business model, and then Commerzbank could back a tie-up.

Despite the animosity, she insisted: “There is a path [to] a friendly deal”.

Sigma Healthcare says deal for UK retailer would not meet its strategic objectives

The Australian pharmacy group that had eyed a takeover of Boots has pulled out of talks, arguing that the potential $10bn deal did not match its objectives.

Sigma Healthcare, which owns both the Chemist Warehouse chain and a wholesale pharmaceutical operation in Australia, confirmed an FT report that it was in talks with private equity firm Sycamore Partners, the owner of Boots, last week.

Canada’s Weston family has also held talks over a deal for the UK chemist chain. 

Sigma said on Monday that it would not pursue what it described as a “potentially unique opportunity” to acquire Boots, adding that “the company has concluded that such an acquisition would not currently meet its strategic and capital investment objectives”.

Shares in Sigma jumped 8 per cent on Monday, having materially weakened last week following the reports of a Boots deal, as some investors balked at the prospect of a large international takeover.

Boots, which traces its roots to a single chemist shop in 1849, has endured a period of uncertainty surrounding its ownership since it was put up for sale in 2022 but bids failed to meet expectations. Sycamore acquired its parent company Walgreens Boots Alliance for $23.7bn last year and the UK business has been linked with a stock market listing. 

Sigma, which completed a near-$6bn merger with the larger chain Chemist Warehouse last year, was considered to be an obvious buyer for Boots after it expanded into the UK last month through a joint venture with GreenLight Healthcare, a small chain centred on London.

It plans to rebrand some of the stores in the style of the Australian retail business — known for its cheap prices and crowded shelves — in the coming months.

Adrian Lemme, an analyst with Citi, said that Sigma had gained “at least two valuable pieces of information from the exercise” after exploring a deal for Boots.

He said that the company had learned how its investors would react to a large-scale deal of an incumbent player and gained more insight into the UK market ahead of its own expansion via the GreenLight joint venture.

Sigma said it would focus on the Australian market but continue to assess acquisition opportunities.

Separately on Monday, British billionaire Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group made a nil-premium offer for its Australian partner Accent Group after accusing it of mismanagement and poor performance.

Frasers, which already owns a near-23 per cent stake in the owner of the Platypus and Athlete’s Foot shoe chains, has offered to buy out the company for almost A$400mn (US$280mn), or A$0.65 a share.

Investment bank Barrenjoey is advising Frasers, which also made a €2.7bn offer for German fashion retailer Hugo Boss last week.  

Shares in Accent rose 13 per cent to A$0.74 after saying it would review the offer.