But it would never have been needed if Alstom had not been stripped out before. All the big engineering companies need to have large cash reserves to cover unexpected technical problems (especially teething problems on new technology), and Alstom's was taken out by Alcatel and Marconi.

Now you can argue that:

• buyers of Alstom shares should have known better then buy a cash poor company (I don't think it was obvious back then, though);
  
• Alstom must have failed somewhere when it purchased the terribly flawed GT24/26 from ABB just a couple years before - because that mistake did cost them a huge amount of money;