BRASILIA — France has struck a landmark outline accord to sell 36 Rafale fighters for between four and seven billion dollars to Brazil, potentially the first foreign customer for the expensive jet, officials said.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced on Monday after meeting French leader Nicolas Sarkozy that advanced contract talks were being held, though French maker Dassault Aviation said it did not expect a final accord until 2010.
France has been seeking a foreign buyer for the multi-role combat jet for more than a decade.
A Dassault spokesman said the company hopes to finalize the sale in 2010. Even though no final accord has been struck, a Dassault spokesman in Paris told AFP: “President Lula’s declaration clearly means that the Rafale has won the competition.”
He declined to put a precise value on the deal.
France has provisionally agreed to transfer the technology to be able to build the jets to Brazil. France is also to buy about 10 military transport aircraft Brazil’s air force plans to build with Embraer, the national aircraft manufacturer.
The French company hopes the success will boost its chances in tenders made by India, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Libya and Greece.
Dassault has previously lost export competitions for Morocco, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the Netherlands.
The Brazil contest has been characterized by fierce lobbying by US group Boeing, which put forward its F/A-18 Super Hornet used by the US Navy and Australian air force, and Sweden’s Saab, promoting its Gripen NG. The rivals had also said they were willing to share technology with Brazil.
Brazil has been concerned by past US vetoes on the export of Brazilian aircraft built with some US components, and the fact the Gripen features a US-made General Electric engine and an Italian-made combat radar.
Throughout its tender process, Brazil has emphasized that full technology-sharing took priority over cost.
Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said the proposed deal would mean Brazil could sell Rafale’s that it makes to the rest of Latin America.
“What’s important for us is to have access to the technology to make this plane in Brazil. That’s what we’re currently negotiating,” Lula said.
Lula said that his country wanted closer military ties with France.
“We are definitively consolidating a strategic partnership we started in 2005,” Lula said in a joint news conference with Sarkozy in Brasilia.
The deal adds to 10 billion dollars’ worth of agreements Brazil has already struck with France to buy five submarines (one to be converted to nuclear power) and 50 military transport helicopters.
Brazil’s only aircraft carrier is a mothballed vessel bought from France in 2000.
Lula, who completes his maximum second mandate at the end of next year, has said he believes Brazil is destined to be one of the great powers of the 21st century.
A country’s “independence also has to be a technological one,” he told reporters.
Brazil’s government wants to give Latin America’s biggest nation military muscle commensurate with its swelling economic and political clout — and its ambitions to win a permanent seat on a reformed UN Security Council.
It also wants the capabilitys to maintain control over its two key resources: its vast Amazon rainforest, and recently discovered offshore oil fields that could make the country one of the world’s top 10 oil producers.
The military transport planes that Brazil is selling, the KC-390, are designed to carry lighter loads than the delayed Airbus A400 heavy military transport plane France is committed to.