HAS the time when Yvon Chouinard, founding president of Patagonia, announces that he is giving up his company for free “To Planet Earth”, the shareholder foundation model, which the De facto community, which brings together French entrepreneurs, pioneers of the shareholder foundation model, is a French-style response to the challenge of transferring businesses and contributing to the common good. What are we waiting for to make it known and adopt it?
Never in public discourse have the terms sobriety, renunciation, reindustrialisation, economic sovereignty, employment, territory, solidarity been so present. We, entrepreneurs members of the De facto community (European dynamic in favor of shareholder foundations), have decided to take up these challenges.
We are about twenty entrepreneurs, from all sectors and of all sizes of companies, who have already made the choice to voluntarily transfer a significant part, or even all of the shares of our companies, to a “shareholder foundation” created in this effect.
A radical, political and committed choice
This dispossession is not sacrificial. It is a radical, political and committed choice. We believe that the company is a collective, a common good that goes beyond us, and that cannot be reduced to private financial capital, of which we would have the exclusive enjoyment or the freedom to dispose. We wish to protect and develop the company, to be faithful to its founding values, to maintain employment and to strengthen its attractiveness on the national territory.
We are also determined to take part in the ecological and solidarity transition, which is so urgent, by supporting projects of general interest financed, in particular by the dividends received by the said foundation. Much better endowed than “classic” foundations, our shareholder foundations can provide powerful relays of contribution to the common good in the future.
Perennial by nature, since a foundation cannot be bought or sold, they embody a stable and long-term shareholding, fully compatible with employee shareholding and/or other investors capable of supporting the prosperity of our companies. Faced with an over-financialized capitalism that is running out of steam, we are proposing, with the shareholder foundation, an alternative model that allows a new sharing of value.
Far from being a figment of the imagination, this model, still too little known in France, is particularly present among our northern European neighbours. Bosch (Germany), Rolex (Switzerland), Carlsberg or Velux (Denmark) belong to foundations. In Denmark, the economic weight of shareholder foundations represents 10% of national wealth. There are thus one thousand three hundred shareholder foundations in Denmark, more than a thousand in Sweden and Germany, more than a hundred in Switzerland… What are we waiting for to encourage them in France and above all be proud of them?
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