London investment bankers have been privately sniping at the two Frenchmen, who run a trade group -- Eurofi -- created to voice the concerns of all European financial institutions to EU officials. The bankers gripe that the pair are pushing a Gallic vision of securities market development and favor French-dominated companies, like pan-European bourse Euronext.
The speculation is fueled in part by Eurofi’s largely French funding. Created by Lebègue and de Larosière in 2000, during the French presidency of the EU, the group draws two thirds of its financial backing from the French Finance Ministry and the European Commission; the remainder comes from predominantly French organizations -- like Euronext.
Unhappiness with Eurofi began to simmer in late November when the group published a 35-page paper -- “An Integrated European Financial Market” -- that called for “a European system of regulation and surveillance.” The report was based on a survey of 55 organizations belonging to Eurofi, the largest proportion of which -- more than one quarter -- were French.
A senior London banker sounds a common complaint: “It’s nothing but a French effort to legislate the creation of harmonized company laws, harmonized fair-disclosure rules and harmonized accounting.” The upshot, he says, would be EU rules that favor a pan-European financial market of the sort that Euronext has cobbled together out of the bourses of France, the Netherlands and Portugal as well as London’s Liffe. Like many of his non-French colleagues, he’d prefer continuing oversight by national regulators, thereby avoiding another layer of bureaucracy.
De Larosière strenuously denies that he and Lebègue are pushing French interests. “We are free in what we say and what we write,” he tells II, “and we are not subject to the validation of the French government or any French organization.” As for the controversial report, the final version, due in May, “could be a bit different,” he says.
