The French Treasury official’s assignment formidable: to rein in 1,616 state-owned businesses.
Samuel-Lajeunesse, 55, heads France’s new Agence des Participations de l’Etat, or State Shareholdings Agency. In March, APE absorbed Treasury’s ill-equipped Service des Participations and assumed the SdP’s oversight of France’s unwieldy industrial portfolio. State companies lost a staggering E18.2 billion ($21.3 billion) last year on sales of E225 billion. “Acquisition binges at EDF and France Télécom that the SdP couldn’t adequately control were the catalyst for the creation of the APE,” he explains.
Samuel-Lajeunesse has boosted his staff from 40 to 65 and recruited from investment banks and accounting and legal firms. “Unlike the SdP, we will finally have the manpower and expertise to carefully analyze major strategic moves at state-owned companies,” he says.
The goal -- all in good time -- is to privatize many of those enterprises. “We will sell when and if it makes sense,” says Samuel-Lajeunesse. “The first priority is to help these companies grow in a secure and stable way, not to privatize them.”
Trained to be an elite bureaucrat at France’s Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the APE director general also has impressive business credentials. In 1992, when he was running the Treasury’s international relations department, Samuel-Lajeunesse was tapped to run troubled, state-owned Lyonnaise de Banque. He wrote down bad real estate loans, expanded the bank’s retail network and created a lucrative wealth management operation, then presided over the bank’s privatization in 1998. In the previous decade he represented the state on the boards of Aérospatiale, Paribas and Pechiney, among others.
“Experience has taught me that you have to take risk to create value,” says Samuel-Lajeunesse. “But one of the main tasks of APE is clearly going to be to reduce that risk as much as possible.”
