André Bénard (original) (raw)

Every few minutes a train speeds beneath the waves, ferrying passengers, cars and freight between Britain and Europe. Twenty two years after the Channel tunnel opened, the link — one of the biggest engineering projects ever completed in Europe — is taken for granted. Without André Bénard, it might never have been built.

The former chairman of Eurotunnel was one of the most important architects of the project, running the business from the moment when the Concession Agreement was signed in 1986 until the opening of commercial services through the tunnel in 1994. He was the link between the Eurotunnel management, the Transmanche Link (TML) consortium of ten contractors, investors and the French government. Without his perseverance and sang-froid, the scheme — repeatedly hit with spiralling costs, investor fright, government vacillation and unexpectedly difficult tunnelling conditions — might well have foundered.

Indeed, it almost did. As costs rose, the contractors and Eurotunnel blamed each other and the banks, essential for keeping the money flowing, took fright. There were no governments to step in: one of the key conditions Margaret Thatcher had laid down from the start was that the Channel tunnel should be privately financed.

By February 1990, the cost of building and fitting out the tunnel, initially set at £4.87 billion, had risen to an estimated £7 billion. Delays, accidents, quarrels with the contractors and Britain’s refusal to fund a high-speed rail link were generating dismal headlines.

Bénard warned that the tunnel “may never be finished”. Eurotunnel was refusing to pay £62 million of overdue bills to TML. The deadline for signing a vital new compromise with TML had come and gone; without it, the four main lending banks were refusing to release any more funds. The telephone finally rang: TML were ready to sign a new deal.

A softly spoken anglophile with fluent English, Bénard had lived in London for 13 years; had spent his life working for Shell; and well knew that patience and diplomacy were the qualities needed in turbulent business conditions.

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He lambasted the railway bosses when their offer fell short of the mark

Born at Draveil, Île-de-France, in 1922 and educated at a lycée in Paris as well as in Nantes and Marseille, André Pierre Jacques Bénard enrolled at the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris to study engineering. With the Second World War raging, he joined the Resistance, was captured and escaped, and was later made an officer in the Légion d’honneur.

Aged 24, he joined the Shell oil company and rose steadily, becoming the managing director of Shell France. He also played a prominent role with other oil company heads in confronting the Opec oil producer cartel in 1973, but as they were leaving for talks in Vienna, the Arab-Israeli war broke out and hopes for dialogue disappeared.

Bénard retired from Shell in 1983. Three years later, as a keen patron of the arts, he was raising funds for the renovation of the Montmajour Abbey and approached an old friend, Alain Chevalier, head of the luxury goods group LVMH. He received instead a counter-suggestion: would he take on the chairmanship of the Channel tunnel?

“I was immediately in favour of establishing closer links between our two countries,” Bénard said. “I thought it was politically important but there was also a sentimental side to my interest: when I was a child, a close friend of my grandfather chaired an earlier Channel project in 1936.”

Eurotunnel itself, the body that he would run with Sir Alastair Morton, was the creation of the banks. They did not want to lend directly to the building contractors; instead, they wanted a single body to stand in between as owner of the tunnel. At the start there was heady optimism. Some 250 banks had joined the lending consortium and small investors, tempted by the offer of cheap travel, snapped up the shares in droves. Eurotunnel got its money on December 1, and the machines began work under the white cliffs of Dover the next day.

The original forecast was that trains would carry 17 million passengers in 2003; in fact, the figure was little over 7 million. The planners had not reckoned with some of the engineering difficulties encountered, especially on the French side, nor with the steep rise in global interest rates. Bénard was aghast as costs ran out of control; Eurotunnel blamed TML and refused to stump up more money.

The growing difficulties were exacerbated by Morton’s abrasive personality — necessary, perhaps, to convince waverers, but a factor that made relations with TML increasingly strained. Ultimately, the consortium demanded his dismissal; Bénard had to finesse a face-saving arrangement that saw the appointment of a buffer between Morton and TML.

He knew he could count on President Mitterrand’s support for the project, but realised that the key figure he needed to convince was Mrs Thatcher. Britain had already aborted one earlier attempt to get a tunnel started. What helped was Bénard’s ability to speak tersely, his grasp of detail, his rigorous pragmatism from long years in industry and his understanding of showmanship.

Massive publicity was arranged for the underground breakthrough, when a man was able to walk all the way from England to France for the first time since the Ice Age. On February 26, 1994, with the tunnel almost complete, Bénard and Morton hosted a lunch for 800 top political and industrial leaders in one of the tunnel’s cavernous chambers, ten miles from the British portal. Mrs Thatcher was invited to cut a cake, which was wheeled in to the strains of Aida.

The tunnel was finally opened by the Queen and President Mitterrand on May 6, 1994. At the opening, Bénard spoke movingly as well as diplomatically about the wider influence of the tunnel, beyond pure transport. “Traditionally, deep down, the British look to the open sea. Yet now, a fixed, visible link to the Continent is forcing them to turn their attention to Europe,” he said.

“The French have always been fascinated by theories from the Eastern bloc; we are the last bastion of Marxist theory, where the citizens serve the state and the state serves itself. The tunnel acts as a liberalising counterbalance.”

Though the tunnel’s opening was a political triumph for both Britain and France, its dire finances continued to dog its builders. Eurotunnel was in dispute with both British and French railways, who refused to guarantee the sums they would pay to use the tunnel. It took some very blunt words from Bénard — who lambasted the railway bosses after their final offer fell short of the mark — before a deal was signed a few days later.

Those same small investors who had been tempted by tunnel mania were also angry and fearful that they would never see a return on their money; they sued on grounds that they had been misled, and more than a decade after the tunnel’s completion, Bénard was pursued through the courts in France.

In 2003, the investigating magistrate ruled that he and Morton would have to stand trial, but in 2007, he was cleared of charges that he had supplied misleading information to shareholders. With characteristic resilience, he could reflect that another famous engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, had served a spell in a debtors’ jail while he was digging the first tunnel under the Thames.

Bénard married his wife, Jacqueline Preiss, a former journalist for Elle magazine, in 1946 when she was in a women’s military corps. Giving an interview from their stylish Chelsea flat in 1994, he said: “Today 48 years sounds a long time to be married, but for us it has always been quite normal”. They had one son, Jean-Marie, who founded his own film company to make commercials.

In his second retirement, Bénard was a director of the French subsidiary of Barclays Bank; a senior adviser to Lazard Frères in New York; and president of the French Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands. Still, he and his wife found time to relax at their country home near St Tropez, where he was a keen golfer.

He was always modest about his part in the tunnel’s acclaim as the major building project in the past 100 years. “I never look at myself as being incredibly successful — but I don’t like failures.”

André Bénard, chairman of Eurotunnel, was born on August 19, 1922. He died on March 15, 2016, aged 93