As April Fools’ jokes go, the decision of a Brussels appeal court to restrict the pool of Fortis shareholders entitled to vote on the sale of most its Belgian banking assets to BNP-Paribas is a pretty poor one – at least for the French bank, the Belgian government and more significantly the troubled bank’s depositors.

But the French and Belgian parties keen to resolve the Fortis crisis must by now have reached the sad conclusion that engineering a cross-border private bank rescue in Belgium is no laughing matter. From the beginning, the Fortis crisis has been a comedy of errors.