Now he’s going to need to draw on all his mastery of markets: He’s the new chief of financial operations at Véolia Environnement, the private sector utility spun off from France’s humbled media giant, Vivendi Universal.
De Forges acknowledges that Véolia’s debt woes are “very much like the state’s problems -- if the state had a balance sheet.” France’s swollen budget deficit will exceed the putative limit for euro-zone countries of 3 percent of GDP for a second straight year in 2003, with no significant reduction in sight.
But Véolia, unlike France, has pledged to start paying down its debt, which totals E12.8 billion ($15.1 billion). Last month the utility sold a U.S. water filter subsidiary, Everpure, for $215 million and issued E700 million of 30-year bonds.
The 49-year-old de Forges is brand-new to the private sector; his career up to this point has been spent within France’s powerful Finance Ministry. De Forges joined the Treasury in 1981 right out of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and by the mid-'90s had advanced to the Treasury’s No. 2 post, head of monetary and financial affairs. There he oversaw the government’s stake in state-owned companies.
“What is new for me is to take into account tax considerations,” he says of his switch to private enterprise. At state companies, he notes: “What I paid with my left hand was going back into my right pocket. I had no fiscal maximization incentive.”
