“The scale of Portugal Telecom is an asset for the country. We don’t want a small company, we want a big one.” So pronounced Portugal’s prime minister, José Sócrates, this week, defending Portugal Telecom’s rejection of a hostile bid from Spain’s Telefónica for its share of Vivo, a fast-growing Brazilian mobile operator. Zeinal Bava, the boss of the Portuguese firm, added a warning that leaving Brazil would mean “amputating Portugal Telecom’s future”.

Yet such surgery may prove hard to resist, given Telefónica’s financial clout. The Spanish firm offered €5.7 billion ($7.2 billion) in cash for the bit of Vivo that it does not own. That is equivalent to over 80% of the total market value of Portugal Telecom itself.

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