This summer, the French finance ministry appointed Jean-Luc Lépine to supervise procedures concerning the State’s part-withdrawal from the Rungis authority, Semmaris.

The State currently owns more than 56 per cent of the company’s capital - the other shareholders being the Town of Paris, a public bank and the tenants (who own 13 per cent). The government announced earlier this year its will to sell part of its share to go under the 50 per cent limit, due to the new status given to the market last year, as reported in this column. The ministry has not yet indicated the volume of shares it wishes to sell. Amongst others, the mighty Credit Agricole bank was said to be interested - and announced recently that it still is.

Whatever, the process is now ongoing and the next few months will almost certainly see a new partner enter the Semmaris capital equation. The aim is to give the authority more freedom to invest in Paris, France and abroad, and to act in a liberal context.

This has caused concern among tenants. Christian Pepineau, fresh produce wholesaler and president of the Rungis tenants’ association, declared that the State and local authorities (towns, general district council, Ile-de-France regional council) should keep the majority share of the capital. “We need stable private investors,” he said. “To see hedge funds acting as raiders is absolutely out of the question.” He stressed the need to welcome groups willing to follow the existing Rungis development projects. “We must stay close to a general consensus,” he said in a statement.

All this echoes the meeting held in Greece this summer between the World Union of Wholesale Markets and the European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, Markos Kyprianou.

Among the topics discussed, two could be linked to the French situation. First, the definition of a wholesale market as given in the EU “hygiene package”, which does not currently take into account the existence of wholesale market authorities and the issue of “services of general interest” as used in the Treaty of the European Union and its relevance and application to wholesale markets.

In both cases, it underlines the necessity to keep an external non-financial structure to manage the activity of a wholesale market. The State is one option, with procedures adapting to fit future investors. This is not an easy situation to create, but once again, we French are going to give it a try.

To be private and relatively state-owned is the aim, but as folklore here has it: “You can’t have the butter and the money to buy it at the same time.”