(Bloomberg) — Thierry Breton has rejected any accountability for the troubles at embattled Atos, the French IT firm he ran for 10 years earlier than changing into a European Union commissioner.
“I’ve no accountability, zero,” Breton informed members of the monetary press affiliation in Paris on Friday, including that he left the corporate with no debt and in a superb place to profit from the rise of the cloud trade.
Breton, who was Atos’s chief govt officer till 2019, has confronted criticism from politicians, bankers and media reviews for contributing to the corporate’s issues because it appears for tactics to repay billions of euros in debt. Atos is now vulnerable to being dismantled, with its destiny within the fingers of a court-appointed mediator. The French Senate is at the moment holding closed-doors hearings on the deterioration of the corporate.
The 69-year-old Frenchman took the helm of Atos in 2009 and molded it into an IT large by means of varied high-profile acquisitions. The corporate’s core enterprise of managing on-site information facilities is now being disrupted by exterior public cloud computing providers pioneered by US giants like Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Company.
Critics of Breton say the corporate’s fast progress by means of massive acquisitions left it with a patchwork of disparate companies that struggled to adapt to modifications within the IT trade.
Breton stated that Atos was one of many first firms to accomplice with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and suggest non-public cloud providers, in his first public feedback on the matter. In his view the corporate’s woes, together with a sequence of governance setbacks and technique shifts, began in 2021, inflicting the agency’s market worth to plunge from €8.2 billion ($8.7 billion) on the finish of 2020 to €266 million at present. His workforce gave journalists a three-page doc outlining the occasions that contributed to the decline of Atos within the years after he left, together with the names of CEOs in cost on the time.
Breton stated he bought all his shares within the firm earlier than changing into a commissioner on the request of the EU Parliament.
In his position as EU inner market commissioner, Breton spearheads efforts to control Large Tech in Europe. He additionally plans to hitch President Emmanuel Macron’s first marketing campaign occasion for the European elections of June later this month in Northern France.
