British Overseas Airways Corporation
On 24 November 1939, BOAC was created by Act of Parliament to become the British state airline, formed from the merger of Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd. The companies had been operating together since war was declared on 3 September 1939, when their operations were evacuated from the London area to Bristol. On 1 April 1940, BOAC started operations as a single company. Following the Fall of France (22 June 1940), BOAC aircraft kept wartime Britain connected with its colonies and the allied world, often under enemy fire, and initially with desperate shortages of long-range aircraft. During the war, the airline was sometimes loosely referred to as 'British Airways', and aircraft and equipment were marked with combinations of that title and/or the Speedbird symbol and/or the Union Flag.
Bank of West Africa (BAO)
Historians like Henri Brunschwig have pointed to the importance of the BOA in the assimilation of French West Africa into the French economic system. Its founding in 1901 came after the extension of limited taxation of subjects, forced labor laws, and voting in the colonial possessions (notably the communes of Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal). The creation of and government support for the BOA was part of an attempt to inject investment into the French colonies. In 1880, almost all French economic interests in the area were in the form of family-run trading houses based in French port cities like Bordeaux and Marseilles. The creation of the BOA coincided with the consolidation of these trading houses into joint stock companies, the ending of formal government concessions to these houses, and the rise of a "de facto" monopoly of their successors. Émile Maurel (CEO of Maurel et Prom) and Henri Nouvion (managing director of Banque du Sénégal) were respectively the first president and managing director of the newly created BOA. By the 1920s, business in the AOF was dominated by just three private joint stock companies: the Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale, the Nouvelle Société Commerciale africaine, and the Société Commerciale de l'Ouest Africain (lagging slightly were the growing plantation and mining interests of the Unilever company). The BAO's board largely overlapped with the boards of these trading companies. When the initial privileges granted to the BOA expired in 1929, the French government granted it a further forty-year concession, with the only stipulation being that the government reserved the right to nominate the BOA's chair, and four members of its board.