Up in the air - again

It has been an almost never ending story ever since the Italian government started looking around for a buyer to bail out the country’s troubled state airline, Alitalia.

But it looks as though the end is in sight – yet again. How often those words have been said in recent months does not bear repeating. Unhappily it’s unlikely to be the outcome Rome would have wished for.

That’s because Air France-KLM has abandoned its plans to takeover the airline.

Talks collapsed on Wednesday when Air France boss, Jean-Cyril Spinetta, walked away from the negotiating table after discovering that Alitalia’s unions were trying to seal a deal with an Italian company instead.

The French-Dutch group’s offer of €139 million would have meant the loss of 2,100 jobs, the phasing out of Alitalia’s cargo service and part of its maintenance facilities – all of which would have needed the approval of the unions.

When they refused to budge, Spinetta threw in the towel saying that the impasse was regrettable especially as far as he (and many others) were concerned, as the takeover represented the only long-term chance for the airline’s survival.

Alitalia has a debt of around €1.2 billion, loses more than €1 million a day and hasn’t notched up an annual profit since 2002. Just to add to the woes, the company also has a fleet of ageing, gas-guzzling aircraft and a 20,000 plus workforce that seems to spend just as much time on the ground striking as it does in the air flying

The Italian government had been looking around for a potential buyer for its 49.9 per cent stake in the company for more than a year until it finally agreed to the Air France offer.

Before the talks collapsed, the Italian economics minister, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, had said that the Air France deal was the only lifeline for Alitalia. He had warned beforehand that if the planned purchase failed the only alternative would be to put the airline into emergency administration, with the likely outcome that any restructuring would be even more painful than the consequences of an Air France takeover.

The double whammy was completed on Wednesday when Maurizio Prato resigned. He was the chairman of Alitalia and the man Rome had charged with finding a buyer.

The whole mess leaves the airline even closer to the brink of bankruptcy less than two weeks ahead of parliamentary elections and its shares have been suspended.

One of the principle opponents of the government's sale of Alitalia (to a non-Italian company) has been prime ministerial candidate Silvio Berlusconi.

He and the unions could now well get their wish, with Alitalia indeed not falling into foreign ownership - but instead going under completely.

Hard to keep the staff

Nothing seems to be going right for the justice minister, Rachida Dati, at the moment.

After admitting at the weekend that she had already used almost two thirds of this year’s entertainment budget allocated to her department, Dati is in trouble again.

This time around the party girl is having difficulty holding on to her staff and is now having to face yet another resignation from her ministry – the 11th since she took office

It’s probably worth remembering that Dati only took over the job 10 months ago, so at present her department is managing to haemorrhage at the rate of at least one person every month.

The latest to throw in the towel is her diplomatic adviser, Pierre Boussaroque.

There were already rumours afoot on Tuesday of his departure in the latest edition of the weekly satirical le Canard Enchaîné, and a day later it was the job of Dati’s spokesman, Guillaume Didier, to confirm the story.

It must be a bit of a thankless task for Didier to have to give credible explanations every time someone jumps ship, certainly in light of the high turnover of personnel within the department.

But he made a sterling attempt by insisting that Boussaroque had resigned to pursue a professional project, which he wanted to oversee in the coming weeks.

Didier also maintained that there was nothing unusual in people coming and going within a ministry. Unfortunately for Dati and her spokesman that might seem a little hard for many outsiders to swallow, as there seem to be an awful lot of “goings”.

One of the most notable departures in recent months was François Guéant, the son of Claude, who just happens to be one of the closest advisors to the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

When seven people left following the resignation of her department director, Michel Dobkine, last summer, Dati responded to claims that they had walked because they had found it impossible to work with her by saying she “wanted a team that would follow orders.”

On past and current evidence that’s exactly what she’s getting – only they’re not apparently very keen to follow her orders.

Still there remain 19 brave souls who have so far stuck with her. But that’s unlikely to remain the case for much longer if we’re to believe le Canard Enchaîné – usually a reliable source of information even if it delights in regularly ridiculing the justice minister by criticising her methods as rushed and uniformed, and her behaviour as authoritarian.

At least two more members of her team are thought to be considering leaving, which, if they do so within the next few weeks, would at least increase her monthly rate of getting rid of people if not her popularity.

Missing the deadline

It can’t be an April Fool surely, as the news broke a day too late for that.

But according to a scoop in the weekly satirical, le Canard Enchaîné, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, created something of a political blunder when he voted in last month’s municipal elections.

Apparently, says the paper, even though he cast his ballot he shouldn’t have done because he had missed the deadline to appear on the electoral register.

It was only the fact that the local mayor, François Lebel, who just happens to be from Sarkozy’s ruling centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) party, had turned a blind eye in return for a bit of quid pro quo that the president was able to trundle on down to the local polling station to exercise his democratic right.

When Sarkozy was elected in May last year, he upped sticks and moved from the ritzy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine to the president’s official residence, the Elysée palace in the capital’s VIII arrondissement. As such he was supposed to have registered with the local town hall by December 31 if he wished to vote in this year’s municipal elections. Yes even the president has to bow to bureaucracy here in France.

Now Sarkozy is a busy man at the best of times and certainly in the first few months of office, before he settled happily into married life, he seemed to be on hyperactive overdrive – omnipresent almost. So it’s probably not much of a surprise that he didn’t get around to registering himself.

Instead, according to le Canard Enchaîné, he left it to two of his staff from the Elysée, and they did in fact pitch up at the town hall complete will all the necessary paperwork, and their boss’s identity card. But that wasn’t until January 3. In other words hey had missed the closing date and in theory deprived him of his right to vote.

In theory only, because of course he did vote thanks largely to a little bit of pre-dating on the forms that were filled in.

Now this is where the tale gets a little confusing because there seem to be contradictory reports – from the very same source – Lebel.

One has it that the mayor, who would surely have known whether such a high profile voter had been along to register, knew nothing about the apparent stretching of the deadline – along the lines of “it’s all a bit of a mystery to me guv." And he has promised to look into the matter with his own internal inquiry.

The other version is that Lebel discovered what had happened a day later on January 4, he rang the Elysée palace and had a little tizzy fit down the ‘phone. But evidently Sarkozy was able to offer him a sweetener to help him forget the matter by asking him to officiate at his marriage to Carla barely one month later.

Lebel has dismissed such a conversation ever occurred as pure invention – but he would, wouldn’t he. After all it does nothing for the integrity of either man.

Meanwhile one of the president’s closest allies – and generally least liked in the media – Claude Guéant, said that all he knew about the matter was that the paperwork had been completed in time and that was all he was going to say.

What the story really reflects is probably the attempts by Sarkozy’s detractors to ridicule him at exactly the time when he’s trying to brush up his image and take on a more presidential demeanour.

Perhaps then it’s not surprising that it was le Canard Enchaîné that started the buzz. After all it enjoys getting a rise out of any political figure, from whatever party.

Nor is it particularly shocking to see the national daily, Liberation, and the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, pick up and run with it, as both are centre-left.

All a bit of a proverbial storm and brings back memories of the fun the media had when it discovered that his former wife, Cecilia, hadn’t bothered to vote in the first round of last year’s presidential election.

And little was made of the fact that a former French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, didn’t bother voting in last month’s elections.

But this is Sarkozy of course – always good for a headline or two. And maybe after all it was an April Fool.