It all came back to the way the negotiation had started. “The valuation was artificial,” a former GE executive said. “It was fixed based on Bouygues.” Once the company leaders, from Immelt and Steve Bolze on down, had decided that they needed to make the French investor whole in order to get the deal done, the secret work being done by bankers and lawyers was an exercise not in calculation but in justification: they were coming up with an explanation for the amount the company had decided they needed to pay.
