The appointment of a former banking lobbyist and government official to chair France’s financial watchdog has prompted one of its board members to resign as he claimed that the move underminded the regulator’s independence.
President Emmanuel Macron formally appointed Marie-Anne Barbat-Layani to chair the Autorité des Marchés Financiers on Wednesday, after French legislators approved her for the role. She was previously general secretary at the ministry of the economy and finance and was the chief executive of the French Banking Federation, a lobbying group, from 2014 to 2019.
“Her CV suggests that she is not very well positioned to resist pressures from the industry nor from the state,” AMF board member Thierry Philipponnat told the Financial Times.
Since its formation in 2003, the AMF has been an “independent administrative authority” — a status that confers it the power to act on behalf of the French state while remaining independent from the government.
Philipponnat, founder of the consumer markets lobby group Finance Watch, had been on the AMF’s decision-making and prosecuting board for more than eight years. Until his resignation, he chaired the regulator’s climate and sustainable finance commission and its market consultative committee.
In his resignation post, he wrote that the conditions for the watchdog to regulate and supervise the financial industry effectively were “not met any more”, in his view.
He told the Financial Times that regardless of specific cases and conflicts of interest, the “blurring of boundaries” signalled by this decision risked eroding public trust in financial institutions.
“Finance is about trust and trust is about perception,” he said, adding that the general public needed to trust that the financial system was ruled by honest people who played by the rules. The AMF declined to comment. Barbat-Layani did not respond to requests for comment.
She succeeds Robert Ophèle and is the first woman to hold the top job at the French regulator. Questioned about her impartiality by France’s parliamentary financial committee, she told legislators that she would be “extremely careful” about potential conflicts of interests throughout her five-year mandate.
Barbat-Layani said the only conflict of interest she could clearly identify related to Dexia, a defunct financial services firm that she administered on behalf of the French state in her last job. However, she said that as the former head of an industry-wide trade body, she had represented an industry as a whole rather than specific corporate interests.
Other potential conflicts of interests would be addressed on a case-by-case basis, Barbat-Layani told MPs. “It is a collegial body where most decisions are taken by the board, and like in all regulatory boards, members including the president declare their conflicts of interest before every meeting.”