Director of complex international projects — energy, infrastructure and transport. Africa, the Middle East, Europe.
Eighteen years, eleven of them lived in Africa and the Middle East — Egypt, the Gulf, Côte d'Ivoire. A $50M offshore gas programme that raised deliveries to a national grid by 80% and secured reserves through 2040. A company of my own in Abidjan that did not survive my partner walking away. Since 2024, critical rail with Hitachi Rail across Balkan Europe and South-East Asia.
The full record is on LinkedIn. What follows is the part it does not show.
How I work
I go to the site before deciding anything. The reports never contain the real problem — a programme where nobody can say who owns the budget, two engineering teams that stopped talking years ago, a subsidiary outgrowing its own processes. The blockage is almost always human, and it is never written down. I did not learn that from head office. I learned it by living in those countries long enough that people told me the truth.
Then I set a frame and hold it: who decides what, on which numbers, reviewed when. Frames are easy to agree to and hard to keep — they become inconvenient the first time they force someone to say a number out loud. Holding it there is most of the job.
I would rather prove than pitch: the contract that opened the Gulf was won on a free comparative test run by our research centre in Paris, not on a presentation. And I take scope rather than wait for it — in Côte d'Ivoire my brief widened every time the technical team turned over, and I took the widening each time.
I work best with teams that are not from one country, in places where things are not yet organised, and where the distance between a decision and its consequences is short.
Why The Strategic South
I did not set out to work in Africa or the Middle East. The job took me there, and I stayed for the people — the histories, the languages, the ways of doing business you meet in a single week in Abidjan or Cairo.
Demography, natural resources and the volume of what has yet to be built put these two regions at the centre of the next fifty years of economic development. That development will not be settled by announcements. It will be settled by what actually gets delivered — and that is the only thing I write about here.
Engineering degree, UniLaSalle (France), 2008 · Executive MBA, ESCP Business School, 2021 · IPMA Level C
French (native) · English (C2) · German and Spanish (B1) · Based in Vienna, Austria