Ex-Credit Suisse chief Tidjane Thiam vows to fight Ivory Coast electoral ban

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Ivorian opposition leader and former Credit Suisse chief executive Tidjane Thiam has said he will “use every legal means” to fight a ruling that has barred him from running for president later this year.

A court in Ivory Coast’s commercial capital of Abidjan this week ruled Thiam — who returned to Ivorian politics in 2023 after leaving Credit Suisse following a corporate espionage scandal — should be struck off the electoral roll because he was a French citizen at the time of his registration.

Thiam told the Financial Times the decision was a “travesty”, accusing the ruling Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace party (RHDP) of a campaign to orchestrate his removal from the electoral register and sideline him ahead of the October election.

Though the decision cannot be appealed, leaving Thiam with limited options in the courts, the 62-year-old former banker said he and his Democratic party would “continue to fight for democracy and for Ivorians to choose freely their leader. We will use every legal means.”

Simon Doho, the Democratic party parliamentary leader, called for “marches” to courts across the country on Thursday in protest.

Thiam has also called on Ivory Coast’s “international stakeholders” to support democracy in his country. “The region is on a democratic evolution, not in a very good place,” Thiam said. “Another electoral crisis is in nobody’s interest, regionally or internationally.”

Thiam, whose career also included spells at McKinsey and Prudential, is the fourth major contender barred from the upcoming race in what critics say has been a pattern by the RHDP to sideline potential threats to President Alassane Ouattara’s 15-year rule. Others include former president Laurent Gbagbo and former sports minister Charles Blé Goudé.

Ouattara, who has yet to announce whether he will contest the October election, has been in power since 2010 and won a contentious third term in 2020 after arguing that a constitutional amendment adopted six years into his tenure reset the clock on his time in office.

Thiam alleged that “the higher echelons of the RHDP were aware of their actions”, but declined to say whether he thought the 83-year-old incumbent Ouattara was directly involved.

François Conradie, a political economist at the Oxford Economics consultancy who follows Ivorian politics, said Thiam’s sidelining looked like the “handiwork of a group of RHDP seniors who know their position depends on Ouattara’s re-election”.

“Thiam is at least somewhat popular, because he’s a breath of fresh air 20 years younger than Ouattara and Gbagbo,” Conradie said, adding that unlike many of the country’s other leaders Thiam was not tainted by the legacy of two brutal civil wars fought between 2002 and 2011.

A spokesperson for Ouattara did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the RHDP told AFP that “we have nothing to do with this case and we have no comments to make on court decisions”.

Thiam, who was naturalised as a French citizen in his 20s, was blocked based on an article of the country’s decades-old nationality law that bars adult Ivorians from acquiring dual nationality.

He had relinquished his French citizenship in February to comply with the law requiring presidential candidates to be exclusively Ivorian.

Thiam said there was no evidence of the nationality law being enforced. “This notion that you can just dig out of nowhere this law that has never been applied and apply to someone in a position as sensitive in the country as I am, for me, it’s a travesty,” Thiam said.

“Hundreds of thousands of Ivorians would be affected,” Thiam said. He argued that, by the logic of the ruling, that the Ivorian team that won the African football championship last year “should give the cup back” as it included dual citizens, such as French-Ivorian striker Sébastien Haller.

Thiam left Credit Suisse in 2020 after it was revealed that the bank spied on two former executives. Thiam, who had stints in the 1990s as an Ivorian presidential adviser and minister, has always maintained he was unaware of the spying.

Asked why he wants to run for president, Thiam said he was “saddened” by the state of the country, citing low life expectancy, poverty and quality of education.

“Today, I think I’m best positioned to lead the transformation [needed] and I love my country,” he said. “If the country was well run, I would be enjoying my hard-earned retirement.”