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As blow after blow rained down last year on Areva, brave investors clung to the conviction that everything would turn out all right at France’s leading nuclear energy group. It might take time, but Areva would shed its reputation as a company too often in the news for the wrong reasons.

Such investors evidently knew nothing of the new year’s surprise that the indomitable Anne Lauvergeon was preparing to unleash both on Areva and on the wider worlds of French business and politics.

Areva’s former chief executive made the startling claim on Monday that, during her 10-year spell in charge of the company, her erstwhile colleagues had arranged for her to be “attacked, slandered and spied on”. Areva declines to comment on her allegation of clandestine inquiries into her life and business activities. But it acknowledges that it has suspended payment of the €1.5m severance package she was awarded last June.

Ostensibly, Areva is awaiting the results of various official investigations into an expensive and highly controversial acquisition made under Ms Lauvergeon’s leadership. Tempted by visions of ever climbing world uranium prices, Areva paid $2.5bn in 2007 for UraMin, a Canada-based company. At that time UraMin was thought to be sitting on abundant deposits of the heavy metal, essential to nuclear energy production, in central and southern Africa.

But after it emerged that UraMin’s uranium assets were smaller and less easily recoverable than anticipated, Areva took a €1.46bn writedown last month on its investment. This came on top of a €426m provision in 2010. Whichever way you cut it, the purchase of UraMin was a shocker of a deal.

Luc Oursel, Areva’s new chief executive, and his team give every impression of wanting to blame this debacle on Ms Lauvergeon. There have even been mutterings about suspected fraud.

Yet Ms Lauvergeon, a talented scientist known affectionately in France as “Atomic Anne”, says that law firms, auditors and the government itself reviewed the acquisition. This seems plausible. Areva is 87 per cent owned by the French state. When did the French state ever fail to take a healthy interest – too healthy, some might say – in its national industrial champions?

Moreover, Ms Lauvergeon asserted this week that she had been “the target of multiple attempts at destabilisation coming from the highest level of the state” for the past four years. Whom did she have in mind? Why did she speak of four years, as opposed to two, six or 10?

It would have dawned on her audience, after some simple mental arithmetic, that Nicolas Sarkozy – never one of Ms Lauvergeon’s greatest fans – was elected president of France just over four years ago. At Areva, Ms Lauvergeon was not short of opponents in business circles, either. One was Henri Proglio, a Sarkozy ally who is chief executive of EDF, the state-owned utility that is Areva’s biggest client. As Ms Lauvergeon’s tenure at Areva drew to its close, Mr Proglio did not disguise his view that the nuclear energy group ought to be broken up.

Perhaps the most sensible explanation for the UraMin mess is that supplied by Marc Goua, a Socialist member of France’s legislature. In the course of producing an in-depth report on France’s nuclear industry, he concluded that there were precious few grounds for suspecting fraud in the UraMin deal. On the other hand, he detected complacency on the part of Areva and its dominant shareholder, the French government. They supposed that UraMin would be a sort of bounteous African goose laying uranium eggs for Areva for decades to come. It turned out to be more of a pig in a poke.

Areva and the government overlooked the risks at UraMin partly because, for understandable reasons, they had their eyes fixed on the ever sharper competition coming from non-European manufacturers of nuclear reactors. They became too eager to lock in, as quickly as possible, what they thought were extensive uranium supplies. It is a cautionary tale of “more haste, less speed”, and Ms Lauvergeon ought to accept her fair share of responsibility for the mistake.

At the same time, the government’s controlling stakes in Areva and EDF mean that France’s nuclear industry is, almost inevitably, a permanent political football. The present presidential election campaign is proving the point once more: François Hollande, Mr Sarkozy’s Socialist challenger, sniffs a chance to win the environmentalist vote and so is threatening to shut down two dozen of France’s 58 nuclear stations by 2025.

The politicisation of business is helpful neither for Areva nor for its investors. Doubtless it is unrealistic to expect the state to withdraw from an industry that accounts for three-quarters of France’s electricity output. But what investors do have a right to demand is less political scheming – and more rigorous boardroom assessments of potential acquisitions.

tony.barber@ft.com

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