My Job
Strategic advisor to FIPRA’s management and clients.
I help our partnership set and hold a course for FIPRA’s growth and development. I become involved in client strategy conversations across all our practices and I lead client relationships in those fields where I am the most appropriate person for that role.
My Experience
Having left the Commission in 2016, I have clocked up 8 years with FIPRA, 5 of them as Chairman. I have more than 35 years of public service, of which 20 were spent in trade and investment negotiations and 12 as a Director General in the European Commission.
My Specialisms
My Proudest Achievements
Being part of the EU core team that delivered the World Trade Organization: a market-opening institution that now we need as badly as ever.
My Education
A first-class honours in French and history from Oxford University, a diploma from the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration, an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal College of Physicians of London and a Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh for services to science.
My Languages
English and French.
My Interests outside work
Gardening, mountains and the kitchen.
My Favourite Brussels anecdote
The courage, inventiveness and willingness to disobey orders of the Baron Sélys de Longchamps, who in 1943 flew his RAF Tornado down the Avenue Louise to attack the HQ of the occupying powers’ security service (coincidentally my first residence in Brussels). The width of the avenues created by King Léopold made it all possible – and the bust of the airman graces the street at the spot where it happened.