Air France's New Contender for Losing His Shirt

Imagine you run a hotel group that’s just sold a controlling stake in its property portfolio so it can pursue a fashionable “asset-light” strategy. What’s the most logical way to deploy some of the 4.6 billion euros ($5.4 billion) of capital released by that transaction to maximize investor returns? Accor, whose brands span the luxury Raffles and Sofitel chains as well as the budget Ibis and hotelF1, has confirmed a weekend report in Les Echos that it’s thinking about buying a minority stake in AirFrance-KLM.