BRUSSELS — At the Madou Tower, home to the EU’s jealously guarded antitrust files, Olivier Guersent’s office is all packed up.
On his desk lies a board game called “Anti-Monopoly” — his gift to Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera, he explained, “to keep up the spirit.”
Last Thursday, the Frenchman officially retired from public service after over 30 years at the European Commission — most recently as the top official at DG COMP, the body that develops and enforces the EU’s competition rules.
It was the ideal way to close a career where antitrust played a big part.“We call DG COMP the Rolls-Royce, because we have a tendency to believe that this is the best directorate-general in the Commission,” he said.
Guersent first set foot in the executive in 1992, fresh off the back of a stint at the French economy ministry. The plan was to stay in Brussels for two years, he said of his arrival at the heart of the EU’s policymaking scene .“But then I met my wife and she is Dutch … so Brussels it was.”
The 63-year-old’s career path is a blueprint for success in climbing the ranks of the EU executive. Over three decades, he’s alternated technical posts with advisory roles to several commissioners, including a four-year stint as head of cabinet for Michel Barnier, then France’s internal market commissioner.
Guersent’s successor at the helm of DG COMP is yet to be announced. But whoever picks up the keys shouldn’t “try to better the engine and polish the shape or whatever,” he said. The point is “to run the Rolls-Royce at pace so that it continues to work perfectly.”
In other words: “Don’t scratch it.”
Part of this will be to resist growing calls to relax competition rules in the name of competitiveness — a key debate in Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen’s second mandate, as the EU strives to keep up with global peers.
His successor, Guersent said, should “resist all the self-serving nonsense of the CEOs of large firms when they whisper to the ears of prime ministers,” that, for example, they would be “a lot more competitive with a lot less competition.”
What’s next for the longtime official? Traveling and quality time with family, he said. His wife has also recently retired, and his third child has just left for university.
Guersent said he’s firmly resisted any (likely sizable) offers for consultancy work. “I have refused any paid job … and any kind of academic recurrent commitments because I want to have at least a year or two where I’m free to do whatever I want to do.”
No books are on the horizon, the official said, except a “very, very dry treaty on competition law” that he will work on with his “friend,” Jonathan Faull, a former British senior Commission official, now a consultant at Brunswick, and Ali Nikpay, a professor at Oxford and lawyer at international firm Gibson Dunn.
While travels are on the agenda, he won’t stay away from France — where he famously boasts tomato-growing ambitions — or the EU capital for too long.
“After 32 years, most of our friends are in Brussels.”
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