Guy Dollé, chief executive of the French steel group Arcelor, will remember Friday, January 13 as an unlucky day. In London on business, he was invited to dinner at the palatial London home of Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man and controlling shareholder and chief executive of Mittal Steel, Arcelor’s deadly rival and the largest steel company in the world.

Mittal had a surprise in store. Over dinner, he set out an audacious plan for Mittal to buy Arcelor, to create a giant steel combine that would be by some distance the world No 1.

The new group would control 10% of global steel production — an almost unthinkable proposition in a traditionally fragmented industry with a surfeit of small players.

Dollé said no. Before leaving, he set out to Mittal all the reasons why he thought the deal was a bad idea. The timing, in his opinion, could not have been worse; Arcelor was already in a no-holds-barred bid war with its German counterpart, Thyssen Krupp. The pair were vying for control of the Canadian steel group Dofasco.

But Mittal was not to be put off. On Monday, it became clear that Arcelor, not Thyssen, was going to win the Canadian auction.

“I had assumed that Thyssen was going to win, but when they withdrew we had to act,” Mittal said yesterday in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times. Arcelor with Dofasco on board would have been a tougher nut to crack, Mittal reasoned, so he had to move quickly.

He had in fact been stalking Arcelor since last year, when the pair faced off in the auction for Kryvorizhstal, the Ukrainian steel group. Mittal eventually won, but only after paying $5 billion (£2.8 billion).

“There were just the two of us at the table, bidding the price up and up — in the end between us we put $2 billion on the price. I didn’t see the point, and the more I thought about it, the more sensible the deal seemed — and of course it fitted with our general strategy of consolidation of the steel industry.” His determination firmed over Christmas and New Year, and led to the fateful Friday the 13th dinner date.

Mittal had arranged a meeting with Dollé for Tuesday afternoon in Paris. He hoped he could use it finally to persuade the Frenchman of the merits of his plan. At the last minute Dollé cancelled, flying off to Canada to seal the Dofasco deal.

On Wednesday evening Mittal called him, offering a last chance for a friendly deal — Dollé turned him down flat.

“It was a very short conversation,” said Aditya Mittal, Lakshmi Mittal’s son and Mittal Steel’s finance director. Bankers from Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and HSBC swarmed through Mittal’s Berkeley Square offices on Wednesday and Thursday, snatching sleep on office couches as a hostile bid plan was hammered out.

On Friday morning Mittal made his play. He announced a $22.7 billion unsolicited bid, offering Arcelor shareholders a mix of cash and shares in his company. The offer was pitched at a 27% premium to Arcelor’s closing price the day before, and was later detailed in Mittal’s first ever London press conference.

Even with the warnings, Arcelor seemed stunned by the move. Earlier in the week, an adviser to the company had assured associates that Mittal had requested the meeting on Tuesday just to talk about the Dofasco deal. Another banker called a senior Mittal executive early on Friday morning, plaintively asking why there had been no warning of the approach. Privately, senior executives at the company said they were surprised not so much by the bid, but by the timing.

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