2024-01-12 18:17:38
Published on Jan 12, 2024 at 7:15 p.m.Updated Jan 12, 2024 at 7:17 p.m.
The big upheaval does not only affect the government team. The reshuffle of the executive carried out since the appointment on Tuesday of Gabriel Attal to Matignon has resulted in a game of musical chairs within the administration at Bercy, while the ministry is preparing for important political deadlines.
The first Council of Ministers of the Attal government thus ratified this Friday the appointment of Bertrand Dumont as head of the Treasury, the most powerful and prestigious administration on economic and financial issues. The position had been vacant since its previous director general, Emmanuel Moulin, was bombarded as chief of staff of the new Prime Minister on Wednesday.
Logical sequence
The rest will therefore not have taken long to organize, and ultimately turns out to be logical. Before being chief of staff to the Minister of Finance, Bruno Le Maire, since the end of 2020 – where he had already taken over from… Emmanuel Moulin – Bertrand Dumont was number two at the Treasury. An administration that he joined upon leaving the ENA, before branching off for two years at the IMF.
This 50-year-old senior civil servant is, however, not a trained economist. This former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure is a history graduate and keen on classical culture. “If you travel with him in Italy or Greece, he is the best guide you can imagine,” laughs a former colleague at Bercy.
The last fifteen years have also made it a perfect guide to the places of economic power in France and in Europe. In 2007, he joined the cabinet of Christine Lagarde, then Minister of Finance, before migrating to Brussels in 2010 alongside Michel Barnier, Commissioner for the Internal Market.
Debt promises
The Savoyard – although initially not a great connoisseur of the subtleties of global finance – then inherited the vast overhaul of regulation decided on the ruins of Lehman Brothers. Bertrand Dumont and his imperturbable calm, always courteous, will be one of the linchpins of the great legislative frenzy that follows.
“He knows people and processes perfectly at European level. This is important for his new position, since it is the Director of the Treasury who is leading the preparatory negotiations for the Ecofin councils of European Finance Ministers for France,” underlines a European source.
After a two-year detour in the private sector within the HSBC bank, he returned to Bercy in 2017, first as deputy chief of staff to Bruno Le Maire – as second… to Emmanuel Moulin, always. A proximity that he also shares with the Secretary General of the Elysée, Alexis Kohler, also a former Treasury member. Suffice to say that the wheels should be well oiled, if ever Emmanuel Macron and Gabriel Attal embark on the recovery of public accounts, as they promise.
From this perspective, the profile of Bertrand Dumont’s successor at the head of Bruno Le Maire’s cabinet in Bercy will not stand out. Jérôme Fournel held the same position alongside Gérald Darmanin from 2017 to 2019 when he was Minister of Public Accounts. Since then, he has taken the helm of the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP). This former ENA student had known Bruno Le Maire in the office of Dominique de Villepin, when the latter was his chief of staff at Matignon. “The message remains the same, we want to restore public finances,” we explain at Bercy.
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