For €450,000, it’s not easy to find a candidate to take over from Jean-Bernard Lévy as head of EDF. According to the newspaper The echoesthe government would even consider relaxing the regulations that limit the remuneration of the directors of public companies to encourage vocations.
450 000 € maximum
François Hollande had made excessive remuneration of the bosses one of his hobbyhorses during the 2012 presidential campaign. From the month of June following his election, his Minister of the Economy Pierre Moscovici announced in the Council of Ministers that the remuneration of the majority state-owned companies would be capped “at 20 times the average of the lowest salaries of the main public companies”. That is €450,000 per year at most.
The measure will be the subject of a decree of July 2012 and seems to be respected to the nearest euro, according to the statement made by the State Participations Agency in its annual activity reports. In 2021, according to the latest statement, no remuneration exceeds €450,000, including the variable part, in the twenty or so public companies concerned. A dozen of them grant their manager the maximum regulatory, in particular the SNCF, the RATP and EDF.
8.7 million on average in the private sector
These amounts are much lower than the salaries of the bosses of large private companies. In 2021, according to calculations by the Scalens listed company services platform, the average compensation allocated to CAC 40 bosses amounted to 8.7 million euros. This is double that granted in 2020 and even 60% more than in 2019. While most of the increases are due to their variable part – linked to the surge in profits in 2021 – the fixed parts have also increased by 19%.
Politically sensitive, raising the ceiling of €450,000 in public companies would not present any technical difficulties, a simple decree being sufficient in this case. The government wishes to accelerate the recruitment of the successor of Jean-Bernard Lévy, in order to lead to the start of the school year, given the challenges awaiting EDF. The future leader will have to oversee the nationalization of the group, restore the fleet to working order, launch the construction of six new EPRs, while participating in the financing of the tariff shield put in place by the State to limit the price of electricity… A program that would be worth more than €450,000 a year, seem to think potential candidates for the job.