Kering nominates three women to its Board of Directors

Kering’s Board of Directors will submit the nomination of Laurence Boone, Sapna Sood and Sophie L’Hélias as Directors of the board for approval to the shareholders at the Group’s next AGM which will be held on April 29, 2016. Boone was previously a director of Kering’s board from 2010 to 2014.

Once these three directors are elected by the shareholders, they will bring their skills, their experience and a diversity of backgrounds and opinions, which will contribute to the quality of the board’s work. Kering’s board of directors would then consist of eleven members, seven women and four men, due to the ending of the terms of directors Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Philippe Lagayette and Jochen Zeitz, which are not being renewed.

Commenting on the nominations, François-Henri Pinault, Chairman and CEO of Kering said, “I will be very happy to welcome Laurence Boone, Sapna Sood and Sophie L’Hélias as members of the board of directors. The diversity of their backgrounds and their renowned expertise will be valuable assets for Kering. Moreover, their profiles are consistent with our values.”

The proportion of women amongst the board of directors would amount to 64 percent, a ratio which exceeds the ratio required under French Law as well as the one recommended by the Afep-Medef Code of Corporate Governance. These appointments reflect Kering’s long-standing commitment to the place of women at all levels in the group. 58 percent of its employees and 51 percent of its managers are women. Four of the 12 members of the executive committee are women, and four CEOs of the Group’s brands are women.

Boone began her career as an analyst at Merrill Lynch Asset Management from 1995 to 1996. She then became a researcher at the Centre d’Études Prospective et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII) before joining the OECD as an economist in 1998. She successively became director of Barclays Capital France in 2004 and managing director and chief economist in 2010. She has been managing director, European Economic Research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch since July 2011.

The author of numerous articles, she taught at the École Polytechnique, ENSAE (the National School of Statistics) and the École Normale Supérieure and is currently an associate professor at the Institut de Sciences politiques of Paris. She is a member of the Circle of Economists and a corresponding member of France’s Council of Economic Analysis. She is a Knight of the Legion of Honour.

Sood is Group Senior Vice President, Health and Safety at Lafarge. She began her career in 1997 as an applications engineer at Fisher-Rosemount in Australia before joining the BOC group (later acquired by Linde AG) in 1999, where she worked for 14 years in a number of different functional positions at corporate level as well as operational positions in Australia, the United States, Europe and Asia. In her latest role within the group, she is in charge of the development of the helium business for the Asia-Pacific zone.

L’Hélias Delattre is a specialist in corporate governance who began her career as a lawyer in M&A and corporate finance in New York and Paris before founding the first corporate governance advisory firm in France in 1993. In 1998 she became director of an investment fund in New York. She is co-founder and former director of the International Corporate Governance Network (www.icgn.org), a London-based non-profit organisation.

She has published many articles in Europe, the United States and Canada on governance issues and is a frequent speaker at conferences on such matters. L’Hélias Delattre co-founded Global Board Access, a peer-to-peer network in the United States and Canada that aims to help identify and promote directors for the boards of listed companies throughout the world. She is also on the steering committee of the Women in Governance Lunch event. She is a member of the Paris and New York bars.