2023-06-10 12:00:00
C’was early February. Denis Kessler had been very discreet for a few months. We no longer met him at conferences or at social cocktail parties at the CAC 40, we only rarely saw him at the Paris Opera, discreetly drying his tears after the curtain fell. There was this tenacious rumor about a disease, but nothing had been officially announced. And then, on January 23, we learned from a press release that the president of the Scor group, a reinsurance giant with nearly 20 billion euros in turnover, had had the head of its managing director. It was the second leader ejected in less than two years… So, we thought that Kessler had not said his last word, that he must be in good shape, even in very good shape. Request an interview by text message. The theme: “But what is going on at Scor? Why so much turbulence at the head of the company? DK’s response: “OK for a coffee with a candy.” »
Ok for a coffee with a candy
He was expecting us on February 9, at 10 a.m., on the sixth and top floor of the ultramodern Scor building of which he was so proud, on avenue Kléber. His assistant had installed us with a coffee in the meeting room equipped with the latest technology (note the total absence of switches, the fingerprint of the boss’s index finger being the essential sesame), adjoining his office with a view of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. After a few minutes of waiting, his footsteps began to echo in the hallway. It was a little lighter than usual, it’s true, the man having shed many pounds, but the range of the voice had lost none of its power and elasticity. It was always impressive to see how Denis Kessler was able to switch suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, from bass to treble, according to his enthusiasm or his nervousness.
He had shot his dolphins one after the other
“So how are you doing? Point ? “On this freezing winter day, Kessler had defended himself from what the Tout-Paris des affaires accused him of having become one of those bosses who cling to power and their remuneration and take malicious pleasure in to shoot their dolphins one after the other, like in an Agatha Christie novel. Because, before Laurent Rousseau, the director general resigned last January, it was Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas, former all-powerful chief of staff of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who had cleared the floor in May 2021 after four short months. “Pff… State Councilors think they know everything… But the reinsurance professions are extremely technical, you can’t just improvise. Ribadeau-Dumas was not ready and he understood nothing about the sector…” Feeling that facts and appearances were against him, that he had to finally agree to dub a successor, he had promised, sworn, spat, that this time it would be different, like in a romance novel, with the new managing director, Thierry Léger, a former Swiss Re employee. He had even assured us that he would be leaving his beloved company next year. It was February 9. He was floating in his costume, but his gaze was lively, the volume high and the words still as incisive. He died four months later, at the age of 71, this Friday, June 9.
READ ALSODenis Kessler: “This shock can change the trajectory of history”
Denis Kessler, native of Mulhouse, son of a commercial agent deported to Dachau for acts of resistance during the Second World War, is a specimen apart in the circle of the great French bosses. This man has had a thousand lives. In order, but we probably forget some, he was: a brilliant student of HEC with a Trotskyist tendency, quick to organize strikes to lower tuition fees; an exceptional academic in economics driven by his professor, mentor and unfailing friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn; the poor manager of a Parisian restaurant opened with his childhood friend who became the boss of the Monde, who died suddenly in 2021, Érik Izraelewicz; a super-lobbyist at the head of the French Federation of Insurance Companies; a number two of the media and explosive Medef in tandem with Baron Ernest-Antoine Seillière, who embodied a harsh and uninhibited boss, including fighting with all his might the 35 hours imposed by the government of Lionel Jospin. His thousand and first life consisted in taking the reins in 2002, at the age of 50, of an unknown company, evolving in an ultra-complex sector (reinsurance), then in a state of deep coma.
The former number two of Medef saves the reinsurance group
Scor, whose business is therefore to reinsure risks already covered by traditional insurers, had entered into an infernal spiral after having lost a billion dollars in the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center: customers then demanded guarantees impossible, the bankers cut the lines and the rating agencies downgrade the company. “I may be stimulated by the complexity, the situation was abysmal, told Kessler. My action at the head of the company was like an incredible chase. “He recapitalizes the group, designs a strategic plan and cuts down the loss-making subsidiaries with an axe. The strongest in subject – doctoral student, double associate (economic sciences and social sciences) and youngest elected to the EHESS – devotes himself body and soul to his new object of study: insurance or the science of major risks.
READ ALSODenis Kessler: “Austerity has not started”
“The Old Testament is a little treaty of reassurance,” he liked to point out. All disasters, which are suffered as divine punishments, are described: the seven plagues of Egypt, the earthquake of Jericho, the tsunami in the Red Sea or the Flood. For Professor Kessler, the Lisbon earthquake, which occurred on 1is November 1755, All Saints’ Day, marks the entry into modernity. “Contemporaries then thought: God could not have wanted to kill thousands of faithful praying in churches. This is how the statisticians appeared, substituting for the divine and fatality a scientific understanding of the laws of nature. “Mission accomplished for Kessler, which recovers Scor and makes it a world champion. At the same time, the one who is renowned on the Paris market for his Homeric anger on his frightened collaborators becomes one of the best paid bosses in the insurance sector.
READ ALSOScor: and Denis Kessler heard “shovel hits on the coffin”
With his success at Scor, he gets his revenge, he who had hoped to succeed Claude Bébéar at the head of AXA but had lost the game against Henri de Castries. Influential, he joined many boards of directors, such as those of BNP Paribas, Bolloré, but also Dassault Aviation, of which he is always close to the leaders. Since 2013, he was a member of the “Committee of Elders” – a voluntary function – which had been created by Serge Dassault to manage his succession at the head of the family group. He had even become its president, and called a meeting followed by a lunch with the other members (Henri Proglio, Jean-Martin Folz, Alain Lambert, etc.) every month at the headquarters of the Dassault group, at the Champs- Elysees. “All the same… It’s not given to everyone to chair the committee of wise men of such a prestigious and strategic group for France”, he told us again last February with pride, while categorically refusing to deliver every detail of the work of this top-secret committee. On September 4, 2018, an event had taken him by surprise and made him mad with rage. Its main shareholder, the mutualist Covéa, known for its brands Maaf, MMA and GMF, had put 8 Billions of Euro’s on the table to acquire the entire capital of Scor. Kessler knew nothing; he sees red and declares total war on his boss Thierry Derez. A very violent fight then ensues, to the delight of many law firms and banks in Paris. Kessler is in a loop, he thinks about it from the morning while shaving to the evening while going to bed, he puts all his energy and all his aggressiveness into the fight. The fight will last almost three years and will end in June 2021. The two groups sign a transactional agreement ending the conflict which threatened to lead to a criminal trial. Covéa is on its way.
READ ALSODenis Kessler – Building the knowledge society
Denis Kessler is also a boss renowned for his freedom of speech – in other words, for his “big mouth”. The “at the same time” is not in his genes. former economics professor extols the virtues of the marketil is liberal from head to toe and proud of it. He groans, or rather he howls against a bloated State, against a France incapable of reforming itself, against a country which drags its level of indebtedness like a ball, against a French educational system which is going straight into the wall. “For forty years I have seen the procrastination and denial in which politicians, legislature after legislature, maintain our country, for lack of lucidity and courage. This sentence goes back to an interview given to the Point in 2012, but he could have pronounced it yesterday.
He railed against politicians who “don’t take the time to think”
On February 9, before taking us back to the elevator, Denis Kessler had put a bundle of books in our arms. He loved books above all else, he had his office full of them, novels, essays, encyclopedias. Under his sole impetus, Scor had also taken over in 2014 THE French university press (PUF) and the Belin editions to merge them intosuite in the Humensis publishing house. Kessler had this habit of offering books to his interlocutors. To the politicians he met, he systematically sent a copy of the Dictionary of Ethics and Moral Philosophy, directed by the philosopher Monique Canto-Sperber. 2 volumes, 2,240 pages… “A political leader must reflect on the meaning of words, justice, law, solidarity… If they regularly consulted this book, I am convinced that the debate of ideas would be of a different order than today! But they don’t take the time to do it…”READ ALSO At the Opera, the off evenings of the CAC 40
During our last visit, the president of Scor gave us a little pocket book mixing French and Latin versions that he was particularly fond of. It was called Nothing new under the sun (There is nothing new under the sun, in Latin). In this collection of texts from Latin literature, we can read texts on insecurity in the city, the corruption of the powerful, the influx of foreigners, natural disasters, power and profit… see that, two millennia earlier, in Antiquity, the same problems and the same findings had already been posed. “These texts are incredible, they are astoundingly modern. There really is nothing new under the sun! Everything is an eternal restart. Denis Kessler, an atypical, eruptive, brilliant boss, capitalist, economist and philosopher, died on June 9, 2023.
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