During a speech to the Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français (CNOSF) last week the minister for education and sport Amélie Oudéa-Castéra issued a “mea culpa” over her disparaging comments about the Littré state primary school in Paris where she briefly educated her eldest son. “I did not react well,” she confessed, saying she had allowed herself to be influenced by her “memories as a mother”. (See Mediapart's story on those disparaging comments here.)
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Unfortunately, the minister's soul-searching was short-lived. Faced with widespread criticism, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra then chose to launch a counter-attack against what she described as a “movement … aimed at depicting me as the symbol of a privileged caste to be fought”.
The woman whose father and mother were, respectively, the CEO of a subsidiary of the Publicis advertising and public relations group and director of human resources at Safran – two companies listed on France's stock exchange the CAC 40 – even insisted that she had inherited nothing from her family other than “the love of a job well done”.
But even without undertaking a deep analysis of the phenomenon of social reproduction on display here, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's own story itself undermines her claims. The minister is in fact a very typical product of the upper echelons of French capitalism.
After leaving the elite higher education establishment the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), and following a brief time working at the public audit body the Cour des Comptes, she spent ten years in management with the CAC 40-listed insurance giant Axa. Then, from 2018 to 2021, she was on the executive board at supermarket chain Carrefour, also listed on the CAC40, before becoming director general of France's governing body for tennis the Fédération Française de Tennis (FFT).
For these positions Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was paid stupendous salaries: nearly 600,000 euros net a year by the end of her time at Carrefour, according to her wealth declaration to the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP), which oversees financial transparency in public office. She also earned 500,000 euros net in her 15 months at the FFT.
To complete the CAC40 set, one could also note that she is married to Frédéric Oudéa, who was CEO at the French bank Société Générale from 2009 to 2023, and who recently took on the role of chair of the board at pharmaceuticals group Sanofi, while also being an independent director at consultancy group Capgemini.
Dividends...
Moreover, like any self-respecting CAC40 executive, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was not content with her household's salaried income, substantial though this was. In Parisian financial capitalism it is standard practice to ensure that executives are also motivated by owning shares in the company where they work.
So in Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's wealth declaration as a minister, quoted by the newspaper Libération, it states that she held 1.9 million euros worth of shares at Axa (valuation as of September 2022), which earned her 128,900 in dividends in 2021, and owned 700,000 shares in the Carrefour group, which brought in 15,000 euros in dividends in 2021.
This additional income is now even more lucrative after Emmanuel Macron reduced taxation on such earnings in 2018, bringing in a flat rate of 30% on income from capital.
In 2022 the minister had a share portfolio worth a total of three million euros. She also had shares in a managed portfolio that contained 10,471 euros worth of shares in luxury goods firm LVMH (valuation as of September 2022), 6,790 euros in Air Liquide shares, 5,607 euros worth of Vinci shares, 4,000 euros in ArcelorMittal shares, 2,367 euros worth of Orange shares, and around 1 500 euros worth of shares in Saint-Gobain and Danone.
All these companies – which are listed on the CAC40 – are sponsors of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. This is an event being overseen by her own ministry. But these sums seem to have been too low for the authorities to consider there to be any conflict of interest. However, a decree issued on January 22th 2024 does forbid the minister from taking part in any cases involving “Axa, Carrefour, Société Générale, Capgemini[…] and Sanofi”.
….and directors' fees
That is not the end of the story. As is common practice in the Paris business world, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra has also joined the boards of various businesses in recent years. This is a good way of making important contacts in the business world, while also being paid through directors' fees or attendance allowances.
Between 2014 and 2022, for example, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was an independent director at automotive parts manufacturer Plastic Omnium, whose CEO, Laurent Burelle, was also president of the Association Française des Entreprises Privées (AFEP), the most powerful lobby group for business bosses.
According to Mediapart's calculations based on Plastic Omnium documentation, the minister received a total of 343,000 euros gross for attending 59 meetings of its main board and committees, or around 5,800 euros a meeting.
Meanwhile, between 2018 and 2022 she also had another independent directorship, this one on the supervisory board of the French private equity firm Eurazeo. According to Mediapart's calculations this firm paid her 193,000 euros gross for having attended 34 board and committee meetings, which comes out at around 5,700 euros per meeting.
Finally, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was for a few months a board director at Carrefour before working there. But though it was brief, this stint still earned her close to 15,000 euros in attendance allowances.
Putting friends first
In other words, she was making more money than she knew what to do with. So why not get friends to share in it? In 2017, when her husband Frédéric Oudéa was at its helm, the bank Société Générale appointed a woman called Lubomira Rochet as an independent board director.
In this role she pocketed 80,000 euros in 2020 and 90,000 euros in 2021 for attending around 30 meetings, Libération has reported. On paper Lubomira Rochet had the right kind of profile for this position; she had been digital director and member of the executive board at the beauty group L'Oréal, another CAC40 listed company, from 2014 to 2021.
The only issue is that Lubomira Rochet has been one of Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's closest friends since they were at middle school together. In a podcast she recorded before being appointed a government minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra described with emotion the “years” she and “Lubomira” has spent at school “dreaming” about putting the world to rights, as well as listening to The Doors, the two friends having worshipped the rock group's lead singer Jim Morrison.
Yet as Libération pointed out, the Afep-MEDEF corporate governance code – which Société Générale itself adheres to – states: “A director is independent when he or she has no relationship of any kind whatsoever with the corporation, its group or its management that may interfere with his or her freedom of judgement.”
So the Oudéa couple appear to have twisted the rules as set out by employers' lobby groups. What makes it even more comical is that in 2018 Amélie Oudéa-Castéra became an active member of a committee at one of these employers' groups, MEDEF, in the team run by its new president Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux. Yet many critics would argue that dispensing with the rules and not worrying about it is part and parcel of being a member of a “privileged caste”.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter