Gallic charm offensive that has swept Europe

JEAN-Francois Theodore, the formidable 54-year-old boss of the Paris-based Euronext stock exchange, has an unjustified reputation as a dour, detail-driven civil servant-turned-businessman. But as his many rivals have discovered to their cost, behind the grey image lurks a persuasive Gallic charm.

How else, ask his admirers, could a man combine three exchanges - Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam - in less than 12 months and then snatch Liffe, the London-based options exchange, from under the nose of the London Stock Exchange?

As the LSE's critics poured scorn on Clara Furse's bungled bid for Liffe, Theodore, who earns more than £400,000 a year, went out of his way to sympathise. Speaking from his holiday home in St Raphael on the French Riviera, Theodore, whose father was a civil servant and mother a judge, said: 'People have been very unfair on Clara and the LSE. It is a great exchange and has a very good future.'

For an ex-civil servant and product of the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration, he has proved a formidably enterprising businessman, transforming the sleepy Paris exchange into one of Europe's premier financial centres.

But he is a far from stereotypical businessman. Each morning on his way to work, he stops off at a vegetable market. He only varies his 9pm departure from the office if he is going to the opera. Theodore says he finds listening to music an antidote to stress.

And while the rest of the French elite are skiing in the Alps, Theodore and his wife Claudine, a doctor, holiday in the Far East.

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