Former Socialist Secretary of State Thierry Mandon announced on Wednesday that he was resigning from his post as director general of the Cité du design in Saint-Etienne, after four years at the head of the establishment in the midst of financial turmoil.
"
Personal reasons lead me to return to Paris
," he told AFP, saying that his departure had "
nothing to do with the financial difficulties of the establishment
", currently at the heart of an audit requested by the metropolis and the city of Saint-Etienne, which chairs the public establishment.
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The metropolis of Saint-Etienne had to vote at the end of September for an amending budgetary decision to fill a hole of 1.4 million euros in the cash flow.
According to Thierry Mandon, the financial situation is “
due to a multitude of reasons in a context of the covid crisis and the difficulty of maintaining the purchasing power of the population
”.
There was also the vertiginous fall in the allocations of the regional council chaired by LR Laurent Wauquiez, "
which pass over the year 2022 from 700,000 euros to 100,000 euros, without explanation
", denounces Marc Chassaubéné, the assistant to the Culture of Saint-Etienne and its metropolis.
The elected official also points to “
a deficit in the process of quantifying the 2022 Biennale which took place from April to July, with only 75,000 paying entries and a drop in store revenue
”.
Marc Chassaubéné told AFP that he had "
commissioned an accounting and financial audit to verify the relevance of the management and organizational choices made by the management of the establishment
".
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"
This work in progress must help us to understand and determine the responsibilities in this deficit which is unacceptable
", he said.
Recruited in the summer of 2018 to "
perfect the Cité's economic model
", Thierry Mandon believes that his four years of management have enabled a "
strengthening of the dynamic Cité du design, both nationally and internationally, in particular thanks to the constant support of the elected officials of the Saint-Etienne metropolis
”, its main funder.
Inaugurated in 2009 on the site of the former Manufacture desarmes de Saint-Etienne, the Cité du design dedicated to art and research is at the heart of an ambitious revitalization project in a city hit by industrial decline.
The stakes are high for Gaël Perdriau, the ex-LR mayor of Saint-Etienne, the only French city with the Unesco creative design label, which has placed design at the heart of its recovery strategy.
Eventually, the former factory must be converted into a "
place of life and trends
" for an investment of around sixty million euros.