International companies are -preparing contingency plans for a possible break-up of the eurozone, interviews with dozens of multinational executives have revealed.

Concerned that Europe’s political leaders are failing to control the spreading sovereign debt crisis, business executives say they feel compelled to protect their companies against a crash that can no longer be wished away. When German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy raised the prospect of a Greek exit from the eurozone this month, it marked the first time that senior European officials had dared to question the permanence of their 13-year-old experiment with monetary union.

“We’ve started thinking what [a break-up] might look like,” Andrew Morgan, president of Diageo Europe, said on Tuesday. “If you get some much bigger kind of?.?.?.?change around the euro, then we are into a different situation altogether. With countries coming out of the euro, you’ve got massive devaluation that makes imported brands very, very expensive.”