HOT TOPIC
“I don’t think destroying or fragmenting
the City of London is a good way forward,” he says. “Destroying a cluster is not good. We should instead enlarge the cluster and make London and Milan the head of a new cluster.” Mr Pezzulli added that he had
particularly in mind euro-denominated clearing, where London is the centre of a €570 billion-a-year trade in financial products in Europe’s single currency.
Paris, Frankfurt and the US Cities with even greater ambitions are Frankfurt and Paris, the latter unveiling in November a campaign to roll out what Prime Minister Manuel Valls called “the tricolour carpet” to attract London businesses. The Paris plan includes a service to help companies deal with French bureaucracy and find offices for relocated staff and schools for their children. Ross McInnes, chairman of French
engine-maker Safran, has been named ‘ambassador’ for the Parisian drive aimed at attracting up to 30,000 jobs from London. “No one is suggesting that someone is going to switch out the lights [in the City] but, clearly, there is going to be a change in the balance of where activities are going to be carried out,” he says, even though France’s
labour and tax laws argue against Paris in many people’s opinion. Germany, on the other hand, is
considering amending its labour laws to make Frankfurt a more attractive hub for banks looking to move staff out of London after Brexit, according to the Financial Times. The newspaper reported in the autumn that an upper salary limit
Some leading American banks have
indicated that, if passporting is lost to London, they are more likely to relocate core operations to New York than elsewhere in Europe. James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, said that, although the bank was looking at whether it needed a new HQ in the Eurozone, he thought “the big winner is going to be New York”.
The Paris plan includes a one-stop service to help companies get to grips with French bureaucracy and find offices for relocated staff and schools for their children
of €100,000 or €150,000 on employee protections was being considered, which would make provisions for such things as redundancies less generous. The proposal was reportedly floated when
a German delegation promoting Frankfurt as a financial centre toured London recently. But while Frankfurt has obvious appeal as a post-Brexit destination – it is, after all, home to the European Central Bank and many other financial institutions – the city’s tough building codes and a shortage of large office space could act as a disincentive.
Mr Gorman’s opposite number at
JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, told an Italian newspaper that, if passporting rights were lost, the bank would “have to relocate a few thousand people to other offices in the Eurozone, though the majority would stay in the UK”.
Madrid, Amsterdam and beyond Europe Nevertheless, some cities see possibilities opening up in niche markets should London’s standing decline. Madrid, for example, is
8 | Re:locate | Winter 2016/17
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