André Giraud - Minister, Director of Fuels, President of COGEMA, member of the International Council of Elf

Born in Bordeaux on April 3, 1925. Lycée de Bordeaux, École polytechnique, École nationale supérieure of petroleum and engines. Engineer at the Corps des mines. Known as Minister of Industry, then Minister of Defense, he was above all a man of energy and more particularly of petroleum and nuclear power. After a year spent in Texas in 1948, he joined the French Petroleum Institute, created a few years earlier; there he was head of department (1951), technical director (1955), deputy director general (1958-1964). In 1964, he succeeded Maurice Leblond as director of fuels; we owe him the change in orientation of the oil policy defined in December 1964, which will encourage the Government to give French companies the means to fight on equal terms with the majors; as regards the CFP, it authorizes the reduction of the "special account", account established at the time of the constitution of the CFP, allowing a supernumerary tax on the profits made within the framework of the IPC (Iraq Petroleum Cy). He is also active in the Organization responsible for the development of the Saharan subsoil. He then went on to numerous high-ranking positions in research, nuclear, EDF, and COGEMA, of which he was president from 1976 to 1978. He would oppose the will of the president of Elf-Aquitaine, Albin Chalandon, d 'acquire Kerr McGee at the end of the 1970s. He was nevertheless a member of the international board of the Elf group in 1994. He left, among other things, a book on the Geopolitics of Oil and Gas with X. Boy de La Tour (1987 ), which remains a reference. Died in 1997.