And in the case of UniCredito, it is already making inroads towards a cross-border combination with Spain's BBV, which itself just combined with Argentaria.
It was never going to be a sure bet, given the complexities of the two companies' operations and the political sensitivities that are almost always stirred by the prospect of a cross-border combination of high-flying industrial champions.
The state-controlled Telenor of Norway said it was in early talks to buy 42percentt of TDC of Denmark, formerly TeleDanmark, possibly foreshadowing a $16 billion merger that could yield the first cross-border combination of Europe's former state telecommunications monopolies.
Mr. Fourtou, 63, is best known as the former leader of Rhône-Poulenc, the French pharmaceutical company that merged with Hoechst of Germany in 1999 to form Aventis, in what was seen as an ambitious and trailblazing cross-border combination in Europe.
And there are fewer obstacles to cross-border combinations today.
Driving these big cross-border combinations, lawyers at these firms say, are the firms' clients.
Analysts were quick to trot out other possible cross-border combinations: British Airways reviving its bid for KLM and possibly adding Iberia of Spain; Lufthansa acquiring Scandinavian Airlines System and Austrian Airlines and Air Francee bailing out Alitalia.
The so-called overlay zone mainly uses overlay in two senses: (a) interaction after regional communities and ethnic cultures are re-defined by nation-states and (b) ethnic border and combination.
T-DNA-flanking genomic regions were amplified using a pair of nested primers specific to the T-DNA borders in combination with a pair of nested primers (AP1, AP2) specific to the adapters of the Clontech GenomeWalker kit.
DLG, which stands for Dark Latin Groove, was the brainchild of Sergio George, a producer who remade Latin pop in the 1990's; it was his laboratory for advanced border-crossing combinations.
Its leaves can be white with narrow green borders or combinations of white, green and rosy pinks in pale to outrageous patterns that approach a third grader's first attempt at stained glass.
