France Wishes to Move the City of London to Paris But well dream on

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Paris charm offensive to persuade London elite to move to France met with mockery

Christian Noyer, the former governor of the Bank of France, has been on a City charm offensive, trying to convince financial institutions to set up over the Channel, arguing that the French capital would be more attractive than post-Brexit Britain.

However, The Sunday Telegraph understands the pitch has failed to impress London’s elite, who associate France more with high taxes and tough employment laws.

“Not in a million years,” said a senior London financier.

The tax was abandoned a year later but left a lasting impression on executives.

Mr Noyer’s presentation concedes France is not as attractive as the UK for tax, but focuses on its relative merits compared with Belgium and Germany.

He attempts to tackle France’s image problems, arguing that “perception is often far from today’s reality”, citing the complaint that “the French labour regulation is not flexible” Full Story

I would now leave the City of London for Paris

The City of London is a city of French bankers. Graduates from top French schools have long been the brainpower behind the City’s supremacy in structured products and are now helping to create the new generation of risk management systems and artificial intelligence products.

Antonin Jullier, Citi’s London-based global head of equity sales is a graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique, as is Sam Wisnia, Deutsche Bank’s head of fixed income structuring and strategic analytics. Pierre Demartines, a director in Blackrock’s data science unit is a graduate of the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble. The list goes on.

“I would go back to France now, yes,” says one French salesman at Goldman Sachs in London, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Macron is very European focused and this is a good signal for both political and fiscal stability.”

“This is just a reminder for us of the other – Brexit – vote,” says a French managing director at a Swiss bank in London. “You have one country inviting us home and the other that’s sadly pushing us out! The energy in France from Macron’s election is something we crave and it’s something that that’s been sorely missing in London lately.”

Although Frankfurt has latterly emerged as banks’ preferred location of any front office jobs which move from London after Brexit, Paris – together with Amsterdam – regularly ranks as bankers’ preferred place to live. The French capital has already been luring banks with favourable tax rates for expats. Macron himself has said he wants “banks, talents, researchers, academics” to move to France after Brexit. So far, however, only HSBC has articulated a plan to move markets staff to Paris, and this is only because it already has a large Paris-based subsidiary with a trading floor. Other banks, like Goldman Sachs, have indicated that only French relationship staff will move to the French capital. Full Story

Could Paris really steal City of London crown after Brexit?

When the president, François Hollande, took an instant hard line on Brexit, saying the City of London could no longer continue its highly prized business of clearing euro-denominated derivatives, it looked like France would push the moral argument for restricting the UK’s huge financial services post-Brexit and attempt to reap the benefits for Paris.

But the issue of whether Paris might stand to gain from any potential City of London restrictions remains a giant question mark on a page of uncertainties. Like everything else about Brexit, it is far more complex than it looks.

The competition for any financial services that might leave the City – and it’s not yet clear what they might be – is ferocious, with a range of cities queuing up. These include Frankfurt, which is home to the European Central Bankand the financial capital of Europe’s biggest economy, and Dublin with its attractive corporate tax rates, as well as Amsterdam and Luxembourg. Paris is far from a certainty.

“We have to end the anti-finance discourse and stop suffocating the sector with tax,” Guillaume Maujean wrote in the Paris business paper Les Echosthis week. In the wake of the EU referendum result, Hollande told the same paper: “We have to adapt our rules, including our tax rules, to make Paris’s financial centre more attractive. Full Story

Paris charm offensive to persuade London elite to move to France met with mockery

I would now leave the City of London for Paris

Could Paris really steal City of London crown after Brexit?

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