“What are we still doing in Orange, Stellantis, the FDJ?” asked the former ministers.
Laurent Saint-Martin in Paris, October 15, 2024. (AFP / LUDOVIC MARIN)
Sell part of the State’s stakes in certain listed companies? This is the idea put forward by Macronist deputies, including Gérald Darmanin, to help deal with the public deficit. An idea which the Minister of Budget and Public Accounts, Laurent Saint-Martin, is ready to discuss, he said on Sunday October 21, although expressing some reservations.
“I have never opposed the debate on the sale of State participations,” he indicated on
France Inter
/
France Televisions
questioned about a proposal from former ministers Olivia Grégoire and Gérald Darmanin and MP Mathieu Lefèvre.
In a column published in
The Tribune
Sunday, the three deputies of the Renaissance party suggest giving in
“participations in which the State itself no longer really understands either its role or its mission”
.
They target “in particular
180 billion stakes
in listed companies: selling only 10% of these stakes would bring in as much, or even more, than the counterproductive increase in corporate tax or the increase in labor costs planned by the government”, they assert.
“What are we still doing in Orange, Stellantis, the FDJ?” they ask, explaining that they will table an amendment to this effect for the 2025 budget.
The Minister of Public Accounts said on Sunday midday that it was an “interesting debate”, while expressing some reservations. “We must always weigh between the transfer of shares which allows the repayment of the debt (…) and
the loss of earnings from dividends
what this creates if you sell your shares”, he underlined, taking the example of the State’s participation in EDF.
The question of dividends
In the 2025 budget, “there is an exceptional dividend paid by EDF, a public company. If tomorrow EDF were no longer a public company,
this dividend would not contribute to reducing our deficit
“, he explained.
“Each time, we have to look at sector by sector, company by company,” he argued, “but the principle of having a portfolio review of State participations and asking ourselves what is the relevance today “Today these participations do not shock me at all.”
Globally,
the minister defended the 2025 budget as “a balanced budget”
and contested the forecasts of the French Observatory of Economic Conditions (OFCE), which expects growth to slow to 0.8%, or 0.3 points less than the executive’s forecast. “These are not our estimates.
We forecast growth of 1.1%
which is already growth effectively impacted by the slowdown that this budget can create,” he indicated.
“This budget is neither a fiscal or austerity draconian. It is a balanced budget which is not likely to slow down this growth too much”, he justified himself, “So we believe that 1.1% growth is a realistic forecast.”
