Anne-Laure Kiechel, shadow super councilor, is demanding the most from indebted states

As in the song of Brigitte Bardot. Abandoned on the beachAnne-Laure Kichel has been “postponing vacations” for two weeks. he knows that next summer “everything will bloom again” in his white-walled house in Patmos. It is on this island, washed by the Aegean Sea, that he annually recharges his batteries with his tribe. “An important ritual break,” he breathes with a smile. The rest of the time, the economic adviser who made a name for himself by helping former Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras restructure his loans in the face of the 2009 sovereign debt explosion is forced to exercise Olympic discipline.

At 5:30 a.m., he does a daily Pilates class and immerses himself in a stream of geopolitical news before heading to his office or the airport to field calls from governments eager for his advice. “After years of the pandemic limiting travel, I started traveling again, now staying longer. To do this job well, we need to immerse ourselves in the countries that approach us and increase the number of meetings on the ground,” he explains from his headquarters on rue Penthièvre in Paris, in the heart of the financial and golden triangle. political power.

A unique experience

To help states finance their investments or expenditures at the best pace, Anne-Laure Kitchell and her teams offer them a complete toolkit of customized services, from fundraising to public policy orientation. Reform projects, selection of taxes to be implemented, five-year development plans… The whole situation of the country is studied in detail to find the best solutions. “We offer both public policy consulting on several disciplines, debt structuring and fundraising, relying on a dedicated team, and a research division whose macroeconomic analyzes serve states and companies.”

His company, Global Sovereign Advisory (GSA), founded in 2019, has grown like a mushroom after the rain. In just five years, forty-five associates joined the Grandmother of the Sovereign Council. About thirty-five countries, several public companies and large groups now rely on it. And GSA’s field of operations spans more than a dozen time zones, from the Gulf States to the Balkans, French-speaking and English-speaking Africa, as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.

Lightning trajectory

When he left his last employer, the prestigious Rothschild & Co bank in Paris, in 2019, the financier was far from imagining that less than a year later he would be participating in competitions for the reconstruction of the largest astronomical phenomena on the planet. Even less that he will be invited to the set Everydayat the height of the health crisis, to answer Jan Barthes’ questions about exploding public deficits. Today, he turns into a superstar when he arrives in force, along with about fifteen colleagues, at the two annual general meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the major global multilateral donors.

“For one week in April and October, the entire microcosm of the financial ecosystem comes together in Washington, delegates, bankers, rating experts, economists and lawyers, and we use it to support our client countries, push the files and take the pulse. during the economy plenaries,” he assures. As a child, he dreamed of being a piano virtuoso, studying music theory for six hours a day under the tender eyes of his parents, before envisioning his destiny as a philanthropic doctor. After an itinerant youth between Switzerland, France, the United States and Germany, he completed his preparatory studies at the secondary school of Louis-le-Grand in Paris and then at the HPP during a double course at the University of Management in Saint-Galle, Switzerland. .

We act like a doctor who detects blockages before providing appropriate treatment

Anne-Laure Kiechel

In 1999, his choice was made: he will be a banker. Not in mergers and acquisitions, the most popular segment among young investment bank recruiters, but for “debt creation.” That is, raising funds from investors for private companies or state treasuries. Lehman Brothers welcomed him with open arms in the capital markets division in New York, then in London and Paris. The subprime crisis forced it to downsize on September 15, 2008, the day the bank filed for bankruptcy.

The episode, he says, “called it for life.” But his experience opened the door for Rothschild to provide rating advice in 2009, before creating an advisory practice for sovereigns, a market then trusted by Lazard Bank. In 2014, he broke the glass ceiling by becoming the bank’s first managing partner at Avenue de Messine. Under his leadership, the Rothschilds obtained their first sovereign mandate, Ivory Coast. Other trophies followed, such as Argentina, Chile, Albania, Ukraine and Senegal, before Greece in 2016. In 2018, he was 43 years old. the magazine Vanity Fair class in the pantheon of the “fifty most influential French people in the world”, right next to a certain Emmanuel Macron…

A global phenomenon

Over time, the shadow councilor has gained some certainty. “We act like a doctor trying to diagnose blockages before providing appropriate treatment, and then determining funding, reforms or solutions to consider,” he explains. No wonder needs are exploding. Just like the level of global public debt, about 90,000 billion dollars at the end of 2023.

“The world owes much more. the earlier shocks have not been fully absorbed, interest rates have reached almost 3% in mature economies and are close to double that in many African countries, which now have to spend more on paying off their interest than on education, health or investment,” the broad strokes explain. is the leader. Result: many developing countries are seeking credit expansion and subsidized financing from multilateral institutions and major donors such as the Gulf states, India and Turkey. The main work has just begun…