Three guesses on the nationality of the company that the Italian government has deemed to be “an exceptional threat” to national security owing to its interest in buying a small Turin-based aerospace supplier? If you guessed a Chinese or Russian company, you would be wrong. It is, in fact, Safran of France, the aerospace and defence company that supplies to critical European military programmes such as Eurofighter.
Safran has made a $1.8bn offer to buy the flight controls and actuation business of Collins Aerospace, which owns Italy’s Microtecnica. The Italian company specialises in making flight control actuators, systems that make things such as wing flaps move on an aircraft.
Rome’s decision to block Safran’s acquisition of Microtecnica — which accounts for just 15 per cent of the wider business’s revenue — was remarkable not just for the virulence of the language. It was surprising because for almost 40 years Microtecnica has been owned by a series of US companies. At the very time when Europe is calling for greater consolidation of its fragmented defence sector, Rome has deemed a company part-owned by an EU ally — the French government, which has an 11 per cent stake in Safran — to be a threat.