Ah, I did not know that, the way I heard it told - behind the scenes - was that their minority stake had that clause in it which gave them the legal power to stop the deal. I'm not sure on what legal grounds the French government would be able to stop this deal otherwise, if not through their control over Orange, which would seem to be a rather blunt instrument.

> Because we have much less private investment, in part due to our social model.

> We don't have many pension funds because most of the retirement system is state-owned, we have few private universities because the best part of the higher education is state-owned... So basically we have no LPs.

The LPs in most Western European VCs and PE parties are rarely pension funds. More often than not they are successful business people flush from selling earlier ventures. It is the lack of those that causes the dearth of capital in France, coupled with the rather difficult employment climate.