Orange undoubtedly has its president and Christel Heydemann – future general manager of the incumbent operator – its future partner. The candidacy for the presidency of Orange of Jacques Aschenbroich, 67, currently at the head of Valeo, was validated on Wednesday by the board of directors of the telecom group, announced the management of the operator on Wednesday. The appointment of the leader, expected for several weeks, had the support of the State, Orange’s largest shareholder. His arrival must nevertheless still be ratified by the general meeting of shareholders, on May 19, “after which the board will meet in order to elect him non-executive chairman of the group”.
An engineer by training and a graduate of the Mines, Jacques Aschenbroich began his career in the senior civil service before joining Saint-Gobain. In 2009, he was appointed to the management of the automotive supplier Valeo, a position he held until the beginning of the year. After handing over the general management of Valeo smoothly to his successor Christophe Périllat, he retains the chairmanship of the board of directors, a position he will hold until the end of 2022 at the latest.
At the end of the marathon procedure for appointing a new pair at the head of Orange, Jacques Aschenbroich will constitute – with Christel Heydemann, recently appointed CEO of Orange – the other half of the incumbent operator’s ticket. The two leaders will be responsible for succeeding Stéphane Richard, the operator’s former CEO, whose departure was announced last November following his conviction in the Tapie case.
An appointment criticized
Still, the appointment of the current president of Valeo is not unanimous on the Orange side, some criticizing the age of the candidate, who will require a change in the group’s statutes to allow him to remain in office after 70 years. . “How, at the same time, could the staff accept that Orange is chaired by a septuagenarian? It is impossible to simultaneously claim that the company needs young recruits to meet the challenges of digital technology and to push back the age of its president beyond 70: staff expect consistency and exemplary governance of the company”, wondered recently the first trade union of the operator, CFE-CGC.
This one is far from being tender with the probable future president of Orange, already nicknamed “Axe et broie” in a message published this Sunday on the social network Twitter. “Even if the President would only reach 70 during his term of office, he could only achieve one, plunging Orange back into a difficult choice in four years”, regretted the union at the beginning of March, for whom “Christel Heydemann does not does not need a Chairman who is old enough to be his father, but someone capable of providing him with the support he needs to enable him to lead the company back to growth”.
However, the arrival of the future president of Orange should allow the incumbent to turn the page on the succession of Stéphane Richard, which has proven to be complicated to say the least. As a reminder, the current CEO of Orange, Stéphane Richard, was sentenced on appeal to a suspended one-year prison sentence and a fine of 50,000 euros after being acquitted at first instance in 2019. The verdict was delivered on 24 last November by the Paris Court of Appeal, condemning the manager for complicity in the embezzlement of public funds in the Crédit Lyonnais arbitration process – at the end of which the businessman Bernard Tapie had received some 400 million euros in 2008, following the sale of Adidas by the banking group.
The CEO of Orange had submitted his resignation to the operator’s board of directors a few hours after his conviction. He has since held the position of interim CEO pending the arrival at the helm of Christel Heydemann, scheduled for April 4.