The 11th hour proposal from GEC Plc that Plessey Co should follow sale of its 50% of GEC Plessey Telecommunications by creating a similar 50-50 joint venture with GEC on naval electronics implies an opportunistic strategy of takeover by stealth, since in a year or so, the co-owners of the naval business would no doubt have been so far from speaking terms that they would have ended up negotiating sale of the balance of the business to one or the other: the proposal was particularly inopportune, because naval electronics is a key area in which the UK Ministry of Defence wants to retain competition; separately, the Ministry firmly denied to the Wall Street Journal that its negotiations for safeguards that would allow a new bid to be launched were near a successful conclusion, implying that any new full bid for Plessey is still weeks away.
