France will this week step up efforts to attract business from London in the wake of the Brexit vote by appointing a team of corporate leaders and politicians to drive the campaign, reports the Financial Times.
Ross McInnes, an Oxford-educated Franco-Australian and chairman of Safran, the French engine maker, is to be named the “ambassador” heading efforts to lure UK-based companies to Paris, said people familiar with the decision.
Valérie Pécresse, the centre-right MP for the wider Paris region, and Anne Hildago, Paris’s socialist mayor, will also be heavily involved in a sign that the initiative has cross-party support.
An important focus will be attracting financial companies likely to be among the worst affected by the decision to leave the EU if they lose their “passporting” rights to operate across the bloc. Some banks, such as HSBC, have signalled that they could move jobs to Paris.
The team will also target companies in the industrial, mining, energy and broader service sectors as they look at any businesses that chose to be based in the UK because of its EU membership, people close to the discussions said.
Setting up the team is the latest step in a multipronged approach adopted by France as several European states compete to attract businesses that decide to move part or all of their operations from the UK.
Immediately after the June 23 referendum, President François Hollande’s Socialist government changed the tax rules for expatriates in Paris to make it more generous.
“We want to build the financial capital of the future … now is the time to come to France,” Manuel Valls, French prime minister, said in July.
In September, French financial regulators said they were simplifying the process of registering new financial companies in Paris, in part by allowing documents to be filed in English. They said this came “in the context of the Brexit vote”.
Paris’s La Défense business district this month unveiled an advertising campaign aimed at capitalising on the uncertainty created by the Brexit vote, with the slogan: “Tired of the fog? Try the frogs!”.