Anne Lauvergeon

Lauvergeon was born into a middle-class family in Dijon, Côte-d'Or; her father taught history and her mother was a social worker. Her grandfather was mayor of a village in Burgundy. She later grew up in Orléans, where her father became a professor of geography.

Lauvergeon attended the École normale de jeunes filles to pass the Agrégation in physics. Then she entered the Corps des Mines. In 1983 she enrolled in her first vocational course with the Corps de Mines, in the iron and steel industry, at Usinor. A second vocational course, in 1984, took place with the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, where she studied chemical safety in Europe.

Early beginnings

From 1985 to 1988, Lauvergeon was with the l'Inspection générale des carrières (IGC). In 1990, she was placed in charge of the mission for the international economy and foreign trade by French President François Mitterrand. The following year, she became assistant secretary-general. She was then named "sherpa", i.e. personal representative to the president, and responsible for preparing international meetings such as the G7 summit.

In 1995, Lauvergeon joined the banking sector, and became a managing partner of Lazard; she was the only woman partner at the firm. While at Lazard, she spent several months at the investment bank's New York office. In late 1996, she left the firm after difficulties with Édouard Stern; according to media reports at the time, Stern had particularly taken exception to an invitation that Lauvergeon received to join the board of French aluminium company Pechiney.

In March 1997, Lauvergeon was appointed general director of Alcatel, before becoming part of the group's executive committee. In that capacity, she was responsible for international activities and the company's industrial shareholdings in the energy and nuclear fields.

Lauvergeon is married to business consultant Olivier Fric.

Controversies

On 16 October 2009 Lauvergeon addressed journalists outside the "Women’s Forum" organised in Deauville. She declared: "To be clear, with same competences, sorry, we will choose the woman or something else rather than the white male." She said these words during the France 2 evening news. This statement generated reaction and was chosen as an example by Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen to explain that positive discrimination was a kind of racism.

In 2011, Lauvergeon filed a legal complaint after she discovered a confidential report by private investigators on her husband Olivier Fric's business activities. By 2012, she asked a French court to appoint an expert to examine the circumstances under which Areva ordered a probe in 2010 into the 2007 purchase of Canadian uranium mining firm UraMin; the request was subsequently denied. An internal audit into the deal did not reveal fraud, but said that presentations made to state holding company APE and to Areva's board about the planned UraMin acquisition had not given enough prominence to the doubts that the internal technical teams had expressed.

Areva initially withheld Lauvergeon's 1.5 million euro ($2 million) severance pay due to the UraMin dispute. Also in 2012, a court ordered the company to sign a contract allowing Lauvergeon to receive her severance pay.

Only 11 days before the first round of the 2012 French presidential election, Lauvergeon accused Sarkozy in an interview with French weekly L'Express of having tried to sell an atomic reactor to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi until mid-2010. In the interview, Lauvergeon also said Sarkozy had offered her a cabinet seat when he was elected in 2007 but she had refused. Sarkozy's spokeswoman Valérie Pécresse responded by accusing Lauvergeon of trying to "settle scores", calling her statements as "fictitious". At the time, Lauvergeon was tipped as a possible minister in a Socialist government under François Hollande.

In 2016, Lauvergeon was put under formal investigation for her role in the UraMin acquisition, over questions on whether she deliberately submitted misleading annual accounts that concealed huge writedowns on its €1.8 billion investment in UraMin. Also, French judicial authorities investigated Fric for insider trading and money laundering over the UraMin purchase.