His victory is clear. This Thursday, Patrick Martin obtained 73.18% of the votes against 26.82% of his competitor Dominique Carlac’h in the Medef presidential election.
The businessman, number two in the employers’ association since 2018, is elected for a period of five years. Favorite in this election, it is a continuation of the work carried out since 2018 by Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux.
Born in 1960 in Lyon, he graduated from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, holds a law degree from the Panthéon-Assas University and the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (ESSEC).
Head of a company with a turnover of 1,000 million euros
In 2016, he became president of Medef Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes while he was director of the Banque de France, of various organizations belonging to the Apicil pension group, and also of Sipare, an investment and financing structure dedicated to SMEs.
Patrick Martin, like Dominique Carlac’h (his opponent), had already competed for the presidency of Medef in 2018, before both withdrew in favor of Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux.
He is best known for being the CEO and main shareholder of the Martin-Belaysoud family business, founded in 1829, specializing in the professional distribution of technical building finishing equipment and industrial and steel supplies. It has 3,000 employees. In 2022, he reaches a turnover of one billion euros.
Led by his father Jean-Yves Martin and later by Patrick, the company has acquired 45 companies since the 1990s and now has more than 200 sites in France, as well as stores in Slovakia and Morocco.
“When I took the reins of this company, it achieved a turnover of tens of millions of euros, it developed more than a billion in 2022,” he celebrates.
According to the last ranking of the magazine challenges, his personal fortune is estimated at 360 million euros. Married to a Dutch woman and father of three daughters, Patrick Martin is a fan of high mountain sports who also played rugby in his youth.
Focus on training and employability
As “boss of bosses”, Patrick Martin is in favor of an additional reduction of 20,000 million euros in taxes on production, to bring them back to the European average.
He believes that the climate transition, due to the “gigantic” investments it requires, “should encourage us to introduce a part of funded pensions into our social protection.”
He also wants to focus on training and employability, especially for older people with the rising retirement age.
According to him, “demographics will force us to look for all these people away from employment.” “Our companies need to increase their efforts to get more involved at the orientation stage, then to receive the apprentices and finally to employ them,” he explained during a discussion on BFM Business.
Finally, he wishes to strengthen the representation of the Medef before the European authorities in Brussels.
The Medef brings together some 190,000 companies that employ a total of more than 10 million workers.
Source: BFM TV
