secures future

12 ♦ FRENCH NEWS

Eurostar secures future with significant investment

Eurostar, the operator which runs passenger trains through the Channel Tunnel, appears to have avoided financial ruin after securing a €290 million investment. The company, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy, said the funds provided by shareholders and banks would “secure Eurostar’s future”.

Eurostar has continued to run a skeleton service between France, London and Belgium during the pandemic, but with severe restrictions on international travel, revenues have plummeted. The train company typically transports 11 million passengers a year, but this dropped by 95% post-pandemic resulting in an annual decrease in revenue from €1.1 billion to just €220 million in 2020.

The London-based company has struggled to access government financial aid due to its ownership structure, with both the British and French governments reluctant to assume sole responsibility for bailing it out. The operator was launched as a joint venture between the French and British governments, but whilst the French state operator SNCF today owns 55% of the company, the British part was sold off to private investors, the largest of which is a Canadian institutional fund manager which has a 30% stake. This has made statebacked aid almost impossible to secure in the UK – the company is British registered, but “foreign-owned”. At the same time the French government was reluctant to give help to a UK company when Brexit meant that guarantees available under the European Union were no longer valid.

According to the company, the recent injection of capital will help it meet its financial commitments in the “short and medium-term” and there are plans to start running more trains between Paris and London over the summer. The company also said that it will use part of the refinancing package to restart the proposed merger with the Thalys rail network, called Green Speed 3. This would allow single ticket bookings between Eurostar and Thalys trains, which run much further afield between France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. ■

Trump supporters want waxwork head

Facebook (Come to Paris)

Acampaign is under way by supporters of Donald Trump to buy his waxwork head from a Parisian museum. When the Grévin Wax Museum re-opened to the public in May, visitors were greeted by a grinning President Biden and further down the hall could be found a serenely smiling Barrack Obama, with Trump conspicuous by his absence.

As is customary for former American presidents, the wax statue had been removed from display in January when Trump's term in office came to an end and was placed in storage. Since opening in 1882, the museum has featured every US president since James Garfield, but when their term ends, their statue is usually taken down, with the heads and bodies kept in separate crates in the building's cellars. “We have kept Obama, as a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; the others are in storage,” a spokesperson for the museum said.

The curator of the Musée Grévin, Yves Delhommeau, came to the attention of Trump supporters after a series of tongue-in-cheek comments about the waxwork. After initially joking that the statue had “taken a lot of hair” to create, a subsequent suggestion that the museum may re-use the statue as part of a Hallowe'en display drew anger from pro-Trump followers on Twitter. This led to numerous unsolicited emails and telephone calls from people wanting to buy the statue. “Some even managed to find the telephone number of my home, including one Englishman who was very determined!” the curator said. “The museum does not sell its statues. We do not play politics.”

Among the museum's 250 or so celebrities and historical figures, political leaders are relatively rare. French President Emmanuel Macron is present, as are German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson does not feature. Former French President François Hollande is no longer on display, but his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy is, but only because he appears alongside his model and singer wife Carla Bruni. ■

Compulsory black boxes for new EU cars from 2022

The European Parliament has voted to make black boxes compulsory in all new vehicles from May 2022 and in all second-hand cars from May 2024. The recorders, which are in reality a small chip inside a crash-proof box, can not be deactivated; they will be installed in an area inaccessible to the car owner and will record a number of measurements for the 30 seconds before and after any crash.

The data recorded includes the speed of the vehicle, the angle of the steering wheel, whether the car was accelerating or braking, if seatbelts were being worn and the GPS coordinates of where the accident occurred. Unlike the black box recorders in airplanes, no audio will be recorded at any point.

Privacy campaigners were quick to denounce the new law, but the European Parliament has specified that only police have the right to access information from the black boxes and that no information can be passed on to third parties, such as insurance providers. Furthermore, the boxes will not have identification numbers that allow them to be linked to a specific vehicle or driver.

The new legislation will save “thousands of lives” according to the Polish MEP Roza Thun who backed the changes: “It's great news and goes further than we had hoped.”

Typically, when both parties contest the facts of an accident, several experts costing many thousands of euros each will have to submit detailed reports, an expensive process that can take years and still not come to a definitive solution. “Following an accident, the new chip will be able to give us evidence and not theories,” argued Philippe Courtois, a lawyer from the National Road Victims Federation. “We will know, in the absence of witnesses, if a driver was going too fast or did not break in time. This will stop victims being falsely accused and may also lead to drivers lifting their foot a little bit.”

Integrating the black boxes into new vehicles should be relatively cheap and simple, but there are fears that the cost of retro-fitting them when selling second-hand vehicles from 2024 will add significantly to the sale price. ■