No one except France thinks EU financial centre should be in Paris, says City envoy

FRANCE’S aggressive attempt to use Brexit to steal business from the City and set up Paris as a rival financial centre to London is doomed to failure, the City of London’s Brexit envoy has said.

Jeremy Browne said that France – led by President Emmanuel Macron – was mounting a highly visible “whole country” effort to take business from London, without much success.

“It’s quite hard to find people in the EU, outside France, who think that the financial centre should be in Paris,” he said. “And my suspicion is that the French are probably disappointed that so far they have not driven even more business out of London.”

Mr Browne, a former Foreign Office minister who has been travelling widely in Europe since the Brexit vote, taking the temperature in EU capitals, said the French were finding it difficult to understand why anyone would rather move to Frankfurt or Dublin.

However, surveys of the Brexit contingency plans announced by major City players show the bulk preferring those two cities, including big names such as Morgan Stanley, Citi and Bank of America, as well as Japan’s Nomura, Mizuho and Sumitomo Mitsui.

“If businesses have taken the decision to locate some of their activity to Dublin or Frankfurt, that says something quite profound about the nature of the French offer, which is not a comfortable home truth for the French,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

He said the lack of support for

France’s grand vision to become the eurozone financial capital after Brexit pointed to a deeper “strategic question” facing the EU about how to cope with Britain’s departure.

European idealists who saw Brexit as a chance to make Europe the world’s third global power of the 21st century – along with China and the USA – were struggling to work out how to make that happen in practice, he added.

According to surveys of the biggest global banks in London by Reuters, some 9,600 jobs could relocate to the EU in the next two years. Only a fraction of that number has moved so far.

Mr Browne said that some City losses were inevitable after Brexit, but these would not have to be fatal for London, so long as the Government maintained the fertile business conditions that made the City thrive in the first place.