Orange CEO Says Company ‘in Israel To Stay’
Image by Getty Images
The chairman of the French telecom company Orange reversed his comments about leaving Israel, saying the company “is in Israel to stay.”
Stephane Richard in an interview Saturday with the French news agency AFP denied that his company’s decision to end a brand-licensing agreement with the Israeli firm Partner was a message that it was seeking to withdraw from Israel.
Richard said that he “sincerely” regretted the “controversy,” according to AFP.
A day earlier, Richard had told the Israeli news website Ynet that he did not mean to say that Orange was pulling out of Israel for political reasons.
“We are friends of Israel, it has nothing do with Israel, we love Israel,” he reportedly said. “My words were misunderstood; I spoke of a purely business issue.”
Richard said earlier in the week in Cairo that his company would end its Israeli presence if it were not contractually bound to Partner. A day later the company announced that it would seek to cancel a recently signed 10-year arrangement with Partner in Israel. Orange has not directly reached out to Partner since Richard’s Cairo remarks, the company said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak on Sunday with French President Francois Hollande about the incident and the implications for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. France owns a 25 percent stake in Orange.
Also Sunday, Netanyahu told his Foreign Ministry to let Richard know that if he wants to set the record straight, he should travel to Israel to speak directly to Netanyahu, not meet with an Israeli diplomat in France, according to AFP.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Friday that France opposes boycotts, but would not intervene in the dispute.
Partner owner Haim Saban, an Egyptian-born Hollywood entertainment tycoon, on Saturday called the Orange claim that it was not trying to pull out of Israel for political reasons a “blatant lie.” Saban told Israel’s Channel 2 in an interview Saturday night that he would fight back so hard that other companies considering a boycott of Israel will “think twice whether they want to take on Israel or not.”
“Trust me,” Saban said, “this is just the beginning.”
Orange maintains two subsidiaries in Israel: Orange Business Services and Viaccess-Orca, a specialist in Internet television.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
