President Nicolas Sarkozy is poised to nominate a close political ally to head France’s national statistics and economic studies institute INSEE in a highly controversial move that threatens to undermine the independence of a body that is the reference point for impartial measurements of the French economy.
Mediapart has learnt from well-informed sources that Jean-Philippe Cotis, 54, a career civil servant and economist specialised in macroeconomics who has run INSEE since 2007, is to be replaced by Jean-Luc Tavernier, who was chief-of-staff to former budget minister Eric Woerth from 2007 to 2010. Woerth was earlier this month placed under investigation, one step short of being charged, for suspected illegal political party funding in connection with his activities as treasurer of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign, and also influence peddling.
A number of INSEE economists have expressed alarm over the planned appointment of Tavernier, which is expected to be announced in the coming weeks, coming in the midst of Sarkozy’s campaign for re-election in the two-round presidential polls that begin in April.
It would contravene Sarkozy’s duty as head of state to remain impartial, however much the president has already undermined the notion in the past. Secondly, INSEE’s key role in measuring France’s economy and its independent status ought to dictate that the institute be run by a top civil servant whose impartiality is recognised.
While the president has not yet brought the decree necessary to replace Cotis with Tavernier before a meeting of the government’s cabinet, Mediapart understands that the decision is sealed. Cotis is to be given a post at the French public audit office, le Cour des comptes, according to Mediapart's sources.
Tavernier, 50, is a civil servant whose political allegiance to Sarkozy was amply illustrated by his membership of a confidential group of ten experts known as the ‘Collège des Dix’, from mid-2005 to mid-2006. The group gathered every month on a Thursday at 6 pm at the Senate under the aegis of another former budget minister, Alain Lambert, who was in charge of developing Sarkozy’s economic programme for his successful 2007 presidential election bid.
Other members included Henri de Castries, CEO of insurer Axa, Frédéric Gonand, then an economist at the OECD, Antoine Magnier, a top civil servant in the labour ministry’s research department, Pierre Mariani, a friend of Sarkozy’s who was his chief of staff while he was budget minister and later became CEO of Dexia, the troubled Franco-Belgian lender,and Philippe Heim, deputy chief of staff for Jean-François Copé, then budget minister, under President Jacques Chirac, now head of Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party. (At the time, Copé and Sarkozy were on poor terms and Heim went to the meetings in secret).
Tavernier was thus one of the team of experts who elaborated some of the most controversial reforms Sarkozy has enacted since becoming president.
Tavernier would not be the first partisan of the government in power to be appointed at INSEE’s helm; the same happened under a socialist administration, and Cotis himself was reportedly initially favoured by Sarkozy when he was appointed in 2007. But a number of the institute's administrators and economists regard Tavernier’s level of political involvement as significantly greater than his predecessors.
An institute long under siege
Following Sarkozy’s election as president in 2007, Tavernier reaped the rewards of his allegiance when he was appointed immediately afterwards as chief-of-staff to Eric Woerth at the budget ministry. In this role he was involved in the highly controversial decision to send to arbitration a compensation claim lodged by controversial French tycoon Bernard Tapie against former state-run bank Crédit Lyonnais, and which resulted in a massive out-of-court settlement to Tapiein 2008 of 403 million euros of public funds (see more on this here, here, and here).
In January 2010, Tavernier was made deputy general commissioner for investment attached to the prime minister’s office, a role involving shaping and overseeing government investment spending.
Sarkozy has long shown hostility towards INSEE. Since 2004, when he was finance minister, and again as president from 2007, he has repeatedly attacked the institute’s management, and subjected it to spending cuts. In 2008 a government plan was hatched to de-localise INSEE to Metz, in eastern France, which appeared to be no more than a disguised attempt to dismantle it. In 2010, its funding was cut by 20%, although Cotis succeeded in reining in much of the planned de-localisation.
Concern among INSEE staff at Tavernier’s appointment will be fed by the memory of his role as director of the finance ministry’s forecasting and economic analysis department, which he took over in 2002, ironically replacing Cotis who had been in the post since 1997. Tavernier’s was one of three departments merged to form the present-day Treasury Department in 2004. The conditions in which he allowed the merger to go through resulted in it becoming dedicated to policy execution rather than research and analysis - a disturbing precedent for INSEE, given its predominant role as a publisher of economic and social statistics which provide the basis for debate in the public arena.
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English version: Sue Landau
(Editing by Graham Tearse)