Frederic Oudea, chief executive of Societe Generale, has hit out at critics who have argued that France's bank reforms, unveiled on Wednesday, do not go far enough and marks a U-turn by President Hollande who had promised a "long war" on the financial sector.
"This law goes very far, we're going to be the first country in practice to implement the law that will give the regulator new capacity to control the risk, go through the balance sheet and to segregate what is useful to the economy and what is not. We will be requested to put these activities into a dedicated subsidiary with no guarantees from the parent company and certain activities will be prevented," Oudea said.
He added that authorities were adding to the burden for banks already facing considerable regulatory challenges through the Basel III rules, which require banks to hold more capital.
"We have a lot already to do and we were not asking for anything like this," Oudea said in response to critics who said the banks' intense lobbying had succeeded.
