French President Nicolas Sarkozy will make a speech on terrorism at a hotel that was attacked two years ago in Mumbai on the final stop of his 4-day tour in India after signing a $9.3 billion preliminary contract for Areva SA to build nuclear reactors.
Sarkozy will make his address at the Oberoi Trident Hotel, where gunmen from Pakistan killed guests and staff during the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai that left 166 people dead. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday in a joint briefing that the two had talked about “common concerns” including Pakistan, Afghanistan and terrorism.
Sarkozy, who travelled to India with a group of 50 business leaders, will finish his visit with a speech to French and Indian executives at a business conference.
France was India’s fifth-biggest trading partner in 2009. Trade between the two countries in the first nine months of this year was 5.3 billion euros ($7 billion).
Areva and state-owned Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd. signed agreements for the construction of two reactors, the first of a series of six at Jaitapur in western India. The deals include fuel supply for 25 years, Paris-based Areva said in a statement yesterday. India plans to add 60,000 megawatts of nuclear power capacity in the next 14 years, a third of the current total output, to address power shortages.
The agreement is Areva’s biggest for so-called evolutionary pressurized reactors since the 2007 sale of two units to China. The company lost a contract in 2009 to supply four of the reactors to the United Arab Emirates, a deal eventually won by a South Korean group.
To contact the reporters on this story: Helene Fouquet in Mumbai hfouquet1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net.