The Happiest Yuppie In Paris

Moutet's Paris: The Happiest Yuppie In Paris

The European, 28 November 1994

THE successive corruption scandals involving France's largest water and building utility, the 150 billion-franc Compagnie Générale des Eaux, have made at least one happy yuppie. This is Jean-Marie Messier, 37 and 3/4 [he'll be 38 on 13 December], youngest partner at the prestigious investment bank Lazard since 1989 and former adviser to Finance Minister Edouard Balladur in 1986-1988. Messieur has been installed last week as designated successor of the redoubtable, secretive Guy Dejouany, 73, at what may be France's highest salary, 16 million francs a year.

For 18 years Dejouany ruled as an absolute monarch over his 200,000 employee-strong empire (where he started working in 1961) from his discreet rue d'Anjou headquarters, a chequebook's throw away from the Elysee. Nobody knew his diary, not even his secretary. His personal telephone lines were scrambled by state-of-the-art military devices. Strong men were daily seen leaving his office in a sweat: Dejouany, who never held a meeting of more than three people outside his company board, played at naming favourites, hinting that he would leave them in charge when he retired, then at pitting them against one another. Under his stewardship CGE became the world leader in water treatment, but also diversified into cable and pay TV (he's the one who really got Mitterrand's old friend André Rousselet fired from Canal Plus.)

But now, as revelation after revelation of payoffs to politicians in exchange for local contracts have made Dejouany the target of several judicial inquiries, the old man had to step down. When he announced his choice of successor, the CGE board (not to mention the infighting top executives) were enraged. Messier? This chubby baby Enarque with absolutely no industrial experience and only five years in investment banking under his belt? Peugeot's Jacques Calvet, a board member, loudly threatened to resign, before bowing to the decision. Young Messier, now effectively in charge of running the company, should be formally made its president in June 1996, after the board approves the 1995 results. "We needed someone clean, not someone from inside the company, who might one day be charged with yet another corruption scandal," CGE insiders told the press.

This drew guffaws from the Paris political and business establishment. Young Messier, who has more than once been dubbed the most ambitious Frenchman of the Nineties, used to be in charge of the first big round of privatisations at the Balladur Finance ministry. The bank advising most of these privatisations was Lazard. Barely a few months after the reelection of Francois Mitterrand to the presidency, ending the first two-year cohabitation, Messier was hired by, surprise, surprise, Lazard, with unheard-of privileges, directly as a full partner (associé-gerant) aged 33, with an office significantly located next to the bank's chairman, the billionnaire Michel David-Weill.

His first job was of course to follow the smooth workings of the newly privatised companies, in direct contradiction with French law, which stipulates that civil servants are not allowed to move into private jobs directly related to their former goverment activities.

Next Messieur was sent to New York for a while, to work with the legendary Felix Rohatyn on the multi-billion franc acquisition by Groupe Schneider of Sqare D, an electrical company, snatching the fat success fees from JP Morgan's, the white-shoe Wall Street bank that had initially presented Square D to Schneider. When he came back to Paris, he was the bank's star, and David-Weilll's obvious favourite.

How does young Jean-Marie do it? "He calculates every single move," says an associate. "For instance, he dresses more modestly than your average investment banker, which usually reassures industrialists. His 17th-arrondissement flat is rented, the furniture is dowdy Napoleon III. His wife Antoinette is no socialite, she prefers to care for their three kids. He listens a lot and unlike most members of the French establishment -- to which he belongs both by background (his family once were partners in the aviation firm Messier-Latecoère) and by right as an Inspecteur des Finances, one of the top 5 of his ENA class -- he never shows off. Balladur likes young men who can keep secrets and he called Messier 'as safe as a tumb'. David-Weill, too, likes people who can keep secrets. Messier knows where most Establishment bodies are buried."

REMEMBER this figure next time French farmers are out in the streets burning prefectures and dumping artichauts: according to the highly reliable INSEE (Institut National des Statistiques et Etudes Economiques), the average French farm income went up 11.5% in 1994, the CAP's second year over 4 times current inflation. Meat farmers made 12% more than last year; winegrowers took in a whopping 40% and large cereal and grain growers (usually accused of reaping all the benefit from demonstrations organised by poorer small farmer) 3% only.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1994.

The Renault Blues (and Was De Gaulle A Royalist?)

Moutet's Paris: The Renault Blues (and Was De Gaulle A Royalist?)

The European, 18 March, 1994

Renault's boss Louis Schweitzer, the quiet Protestant Polytechnicien who used to be chief of staff to Socialist PM Laurent Fabius (and is a direct descendent of legendary Dr Albert Schweitzer), has cause to feel sore these days. First of all, his long-planned merger with Volvo, the ailing Swedish carmakers, was botched at the last minute. The jittery, privately-owned Swedes left their French bride standing at the altar after our new Minister for Industry Gérard Longuet's undiplomatic gesticulations, insisting to announce and sign the new contract himself, thereby showing how little the French government believes in the independence of the companies it controls.

This cost Renault, in addition to a massive loss of face, hundreds of millions of francs in fees to their investment bankers, the arch-establishment Lazard Frères. (The Lazard partner who drew up the contract, énarque François Polge de Combret, a former aide to President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is also said to have included, with Giscard-like arrogance, clauses leaving the Swedes in casual ignorance as to the French government's golden shares.)

Secondly, Schweitzer, who thought he would preside over the Renault privatisation, now awaits to be sacked on 22 May, the date at which he could reasonably have expected his mandate to be renewed. (The company is comfortably in the black and the entire Renault range of cars is a success, to the extent that the R21 is now the best-selling foreign car in Germany.) Longuet, a naive soul, was all in favour.

Yet instead of Renault, the government will next put the loss-making Bull computers company on the block, even if it means flogging it off at bargain basement prices to IBM: Edouard Balladur has decided that no Socialist could possibly have the power to set up a noyau dur, the tightly-knit group of influential shareholders which prevent large French corporations from being taken over. Instead, Schweitzer is currently being enticed to accept the chairmanship of SNCF, the national railways, which has posted losses of FF 10Bn last year, is overstaffed, strike-ridden, under attack from the Greens for its projected TGV-Provence, and has just failed miserably to introduce its new reservations system, Socrates. Schweitzer's qualifications, you are told in Paris, is that he has always collected model electric trains and of course that he's a Fabiusien.

POOR Jacques Delors is rumoured to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the very time when he is being pressed to run for the presidency by a wide majority of left-wingers, who believe he can attract enough votes from the centre to win in 1995, his strong-willed daughter, former employment minister Martine Aubry, has put her foot down. Aubry has a good shot to become France's first woman president in 2002, and reportedly told her father that his taking the top job would be damaging to her own career (she would hate the likely suspicions of nepotism). The mousy Madame Delors herself, a bespectacled, unfashionable woman who may not relish the perspective of living in the Elysée glass-house, is said to have sided with her daughter, telling the beleaguered Delors that it was ''Martine's turn.''

WAS General de Gaulle a Royalist? So says Henri, Comte de Paris, 85, the pretender to the throne of France, who for years told intimates (and not-so-intimates) how Le General really intended to make him his successor in 1965.

The Comte prefers to underline that he's descended from Louis XIV younger brother, Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, than from France's last reigning King (and first Constitutional monarch), Louis-Philippe, called ''the regicide'' by most of his family since he voted the death of his cousin Louis XVI in 1793.

Barred from living on French soil by an 1886 Bill of Exile repealed only in 1950, Henri de Paris fought in the Foreign Legion during the Second World War, and finally came back to France with his family, soon to be sought out, says he, by General de Gaulle. They started meeting regularly over lunch, a habit which didn't stop with de Gaulle's return to power in 1958. The Comte claims de Gaulle had in mind for him a scheme not unlike Franco's high-handed restoration of Juan-Carlos de Borbon in Spain - but that the General's entourage almost coerced him into standing a second time. Surviving Gaullists guffaw at this. One didn't coerce de Gaulle, they say, adding that the Comte would have believed anything.

Now the Comte has published in book form his entire correspondence with de Gaulle (Dialogue sur la France, éditions Fayard), as well as what he claims to be exact transcripts of their conversations. The result is, how shall one put it, embarrassing.

The conversations show de Gaulle discussing everything from Algerian independence to the Fifth Republic Constitution with the Comte. The letters are considerably sparer, to the extent that the Comte has had to include absolutely every single piece of paper that ever circulated between them: bread-and-butter letters, Christmas cards, condolences, congratulations for the Comte's thirteen children's marriages, cover- and thank-you notes, stiffies from long-forgotten State dinners at the Elysée (robe longue, décorations), transcripts of telephone calls between de Gaulle's and the Comte's private secretaries, opinion pieces the Comte wrote for his own political newsletter and sent to the Elysée, everything is grist to his mill to fill up some 200 widely-spaced pages.

The most interesting revelation is no doubt that the General usually signed off with l'hommage de mon fidèle devouement, while the Comte never failed to conclude as votre affectionné, Henri., which I can't help believing must have sounded to the General as a deplorable instance of familiarity.

HOWEVER ungallant this sounds, it's hard not to notice that as his ratings plunge in the polls, Edouard Balladur seems to have gained the few extra pounds that cause his beautiful, made-to-measure Henry Poole Savile Row suits to strain at the seams. In his five years in Opposition, preparing for his current job with amazing determination (and a full-time staff of half a dozen political advisers), the sweet-toothed Balladur lost over 10 kilos in order to look younger on the day of his projected appointment as PM, a remarkable achievement for a man of 60 whose favourite pudding is a heavenly confection of whipped cream, chocolate and chestnut mousse called a Mont-Blanc from the renowned rue de Rivoli tea-room Angelina's. Vowing he'd never regain his flab, Balladur intrepidly had all his pinstripes, herringbone tweeds, exquisite Prince of Wales checks and heather mixture sports jackets flown to London to be taken in. Considering the price (some 2,000 for a coat, a decent shirt and two pairs of trousers) of a single Henry Poole outfit suitable for the nattiest man in France, the PM now has what might be called a considerable vested interest in staying popular and keeping off the gratification food.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1994.