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As its Paris edition moves to the Grand Palais, the fair group is extending its reach into retail, food and fragrance — and that's just the start.

PARIS — Art Basel is back in Paris with a new venue and brand extensions into retail, food and fragrance, as it broadens its reach amid a challenging art market.

For its third edition, which opens to the public from Friday to Sunday, the art fair will move to the recently renovated Grand Palais and has been rebranded from Paris+ par Art Basel to Art Basel Paris, in line with its other editions in Basel, Miami Beach and Hong Kong.

Cementing the fair group’s foray into retail in Basel in June, the event will mark the first Paris edition of the Art Basel Shop, curated by Sarah Andelman, the former creative director of Paris concept store Colette.

Art Basel Paris will also unfurl at key venues across town as part of an expanded program of free public events, supported by Miu Miu as public program official partner.

It’s all part of Art Basel chief executive officer Noah Horowitz’s plan to tap new revenue streams by bringing the Art Basel brand to a broader audience — which means demonstrating there is a life to the fair beyond the splashy deals that have made its global reputation.

“In many ways, as a business, one of the greatest hindrances that we have is simply people’s association with what the brand is, without really understanding what Art Basel is,” Horowitz told WWD in an interview.

“We stand for artistic excellence and opportunity at all levels of the spectrum, and supporting artists in the most precise and ambitious way is essential for us. But precise and ambitious doesn’t necessarily mean millions of dollars,” he added.

Alongside priceless artworks by the likes of René Magritte, Egon Schiele and Pablo Picasso, visitors to the Paris fair can walk away with accessibly priced goods such as a gold Robert Indiana “Love” pin for 14 euros, or an AB by Art Basel-branded tote bag priced at 80 euros.

These will be sold alongside limited-edition art objects and a capsule collection by art collective Claire Fontaine.

Art Basel is also strengthening its ties with luxury brands.

Louis Vuitton is marking its third year as associate partner of the Paris fair with a stand on the Balcony of Honor of the Grand Palais celebrating its longstanding collaboration with Frank Gehry.

In addition to its new partnership with Miu Miu, Art Basel has teamed with Guerlain to launch a limited edition of its unisex fragrance Oeillet Pourpre with packaging featuring art by Julie Beaufils.

Excitement has been building around the Paris edition, despite a contraction in the art market last year following two consecutive years of growth. Business was down 4 percent to an estimated $65 billion, according to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2024 by Arts Economics.

Horowitz expects a rise in visitors from the 38,000 people that attended the VIP and public days last year at the Grand Palais Éphémère, the temporary venue near the Eiffel Tower that hosted the first two editions of the fair.

Since taking over as CEO in 2022, following an earlier stint as Art Basel’s director of the Americas, Horowitz has been working to unlock the brand’s potential alongside James Murdoch, whose venture capital firm Lupa Systems holds a 38.5 percent stake in Art Basel’s Swiss parent company, MCH Group Ltd.

“The overall Art Basel proposition is just growing and growing, and it’s a compelling offering,” he said.

Horowitz sat down with WWD to discuss the challenges in China, harnessing Art Basel’s brand power, and why Paris is always a good idea.

WWD: When you took over as CEO of Art Basel just after the coronavirus pandemic, what were the challenges and opportunities that you identified?

Noah Horowitz: COVID-19 really brought the world’s attention to the inherent challenges of running an event-based business that only alights a few times a year.

Our business — as other businesses, whether it’s music, film, luxury, fashion — is going through a period of change as well. We’re seeing the largest galleries consolidate their position, get larger. There’s been talk for some time now of some of the challenges of the middle market. Equally on the opportunity side, our business has never been more diverse, more rich in its geographic dispersion.

The great opportunity with Art Basel is just the strength and power of the brand and the buy-in that we have from our global community of galleries, of collectors, of the institutions and then the cities and local communities that we work with, and then the cascade of art-loving audiences globally that have come to Art Basel.

This is a transformational zeitgeist wave, in a sense, that Art Basel for many years now has ridden and also helped to define. So I think the great opportunity with Art Basel is learning from COVID-19 how to build a business that’s more resilient, that goes beyond the four fairs…but also fundamentally, to continue to drive value and business for our gallery clients, and ultimately to gain the trust of their artists.

WWD: People follow Art Basel, whether they’re at Art Basel or not, especially in the case of Miami, because there are so many celebrities and brands that are there.

N.H.: Absolutely, and that transformation is massive. It’s taken Art Basel, which has been in business since 1970 as this August fair for real connoisseurs and in many ways for more purist audiences, and the Miami lightning strike was really to course correct that and totally disrupt and explode that into a much larger stage.

The brand is so strong and the idea of Art Basel is so large and exciting for those audiences, so it’s just completely changed the rules of the game and created its own ecosystem of art, music, fashion, luxury. I have a lot of friends in the American context that are entrepreneurs, VCs, and for them, Art Basel week in December is the week in the American cultural calendar where those communities come together.

Part of our mission now is to really get under the surface of that, to harness that.

WWD: How will Art Basel’s move to the Grand Palais impact the number of visitors and overall business at the fair?

N.H.: Paris itself really holds the imagination in the dream space of the cultural world. There’s really no city in the world that is more magical on the minds of anybody that wants to engage with art and culture.

You already have that as a backdrop, and then the Grand Palais, arguably, is the greatest venue in the world to look at art under its glass dome and in the space.

In all my years with Art Basel, I’ve seldom seen such buy-in from our audiences globally in terms of commitment to coming. It really is the event of the year across the entire art market and art world calendar, and that’s just an unbelievable testament to the power of the brand and the belief in the brand, and the excitement, in this case specifically, around Paris in 2024 and the Grand Palais itself.

WWD: Do you expect an increase in visitors for Art Basel Paris this year?

N.H.: We have 27 percent more galleries. There’s 195 galleries within it.

In Hong Kong, Miami Beach and Basel, we range from about 240 to 280, 290 galleries. So the number of galleries is smaller, the size of the booths is also smaller. It’s the only venue that’s not a convention center that we operate in, so there’s a completely different feel.

[But] it’s significantly larger than the Grand Palais Ephémère and as a result of that, we anticipate more audiences to come through the halls in the next days.

WWD: Why was it important to rebrand the fair?

N.H.: Many people were already referring it to Art Basel Paris, but to be clear, that [decision] was taken hand in hand with the Ministry of Culture and ultimately, in the end, made sense to all of us and has everything to do with the imprimatur of now truly arriving in this extraordinary venue.

WWD: This year, Miu Miu is partnering with you on the public-facing parts of the program. How do you think about establishing those partnerships with luxury brands, and why does that make sense for Art Basel Paris?

N.H.: It makes sense for the business as a whole, and we regularly work with luxury brands in the other venues that we operate, but of course, it makes sense in Paris especially because of Paris’ close relationship with luxury, with fashion. Miu Miu is an extraordinary brand with this unbelievable growth trajectory in the last few years and it’s just something that was very organic.

But, of course, we work with Louis Vuitton as well, with Guerlain.

We’re really listening to our audiences. We’re closer and closer to our clients and customers and there’s new generations of art-loving audiences that are coming to art through luxury, through fashion.

WWD: Why did you decide to expand into retail with the Art Basel Shop?

N.H.: Again, it gets back to listening to our audiences and creating different channels to create touchpoints with our audiences.

Launching that in partnership with Sarah Andelman, who’s such a force in that field, has been extraordinary. She’s so insightful, she’s done this in so many different ways, in different guises over the years, so when we launched in Basel in June, it was a great first step. There’s a few tranches of it as well. There’s an Art Basel-branded line, then there’s the capsule collections, and then there’s consignments, limited editions, multiples, etc. So it’s a nice way also for us to offer our gallery clients a different way of presenting their artists’ work with us at our shows.

Art Basel itself, setting the Art Basel shop aside, is a place where, of course, you have Picassos, you have Basquiats, you have Warhols for tens of millions of dollars, and that’s very integral to the brand, but you also have an extraordinary array of artwork under $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 that is expensive, but also considerably more accessible to audiences than is often thought to be the case when you conjure the idea of what Art Basel is in your mind. And strategically, the Art Basel shop is another way to further drive that home.

That’s super important, especially as the market enters a more challenging period.

WWD: Coming from Basel, was there anything that you learned that has made you tweak the format or the products for the Paris store?

N.H.: One of the lessons was that people are really interested. When we did this for the first time in the Unlimited hall, at certain moments, we couldn’t even service the amount of interest that was coming through, so [it’s about] siting it correctly, having the right selection of material. That’s where working with a real expert like Sarah [is key]. On the one hand, there’s limited-edition artworks and multiples and editions that are several thousand dollars, but she’s also very specific and passionate about having pins and pencils and other things that really extend the reach of what this is beyond that. So learning what people like — they love tote bags, by the way — is really interesting. All of this, in each of the cities — because we’ll be rolling this out globally — is going to be a learning exercise for us to understand what works in each of the venues.

WWD: We’re talking with the shop about establishing Art Basel as a brand. How could that brand expand across other disciplines or interact with people in their everyday lives? Could we be seeing different ways of the Art Basel brand being deployed?

N.H.: The simple answer is, yes. The more cryptic one is, we’re not quite there yet. We need to understand how to operate this as a business.

Moving; producing work, materials and goods for sale; importing, exporting; storage — they’re new muscles, so to speak, that we’re learning in real time and each of the markets is different.

The rules are different, the legal requirements are different. But looking out into the future, there’s a lot of opportunities to expand this.

We haven’t fully unlocked an e-commerce or a digital business around this. We’re evaluating. I think, ultimately, we’ll get there, but we’re being very intentional about how we roll this out.

There are other extensions as well. One of the other things that I’m excited about in Paris, that we also launched in Basel this year, is a partnership with We Are Ona, the pop-up restaurant. We’re doing this project in Paris next week with Carsten Höller and his Brutalist Kitchen.

It’s another way of working directly hand-in-hand with others — in this case, the culinary space — to create excitement and engagement with the brand and the fair week.

WWD: Do you think that there is potential to have this with film, design and other disciplines?

N.H.: A lot of these things are already happening. Design Miami is a business that has been around Art Basel, and we’re very close with, since many years now in Miami, and they’ll now be for the second year in Paris. We’ve collaborated with the Tribeca Festival in Miami. Last year, we did a really great series of talks and screenings and some concerts.

There’s a lot of opportunities in all these different directions, and they’re all things we’re exploring and again, looking at very intentionally: where are the obvious overlaps? Where can we bring something to the table that’s unique?

WWD: How would you qualify the state of the French art market right now?

N.H.: Generally speaking, it’s on the ascendant. The revitalization of the gallery sector in Paris is something that I haven’t seen previously in my many years of coming to Paris.

Our largest clients globally are investing in real estate and opening spaces and programming ambitiously in Paris. Of course, there’s also a younger ecosystem of fantastic galleries as well in Belleville, in the Marais and elsewhere.

And then, of course, you have the auction houses: Sotheby’s opening their new space on Avenue Matignon is exciting.

We’re seeing Paris becoming more and more relevant to sales globally. Equally, the downturn in the market is a thing. The global market was down about 4 percent in total in 2023. What we’ve seen in the public sector, in terms of the results out of the auction houses, is double-digit declines in the first half of the year. The fall is off to, it seems, a stronger, more confident start, but there’s a lot going on in the world right now. It’s an election year in the U.S., obviously there’s the conflict still going through its rounds in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Interest rates are coming down somewhat, but they’re still high relative to where they were a few years ago. We’re in a moment of certain challenges, but our feeling and our sense from talking to clients is that business is absolutely still getting done. Our great focus with our clients is ensuring that the cost side of that is balanced out. A lot of galleries expanded during the COVID-19 period. The cost of shipping and logistics has really spiked, not just in our industry, but globally, so trying to figure out how to create that balance is one of the things that we, as an industry leader, are really focused on.

WWD: How has the slowdown in China affected your business, especially Art Basel Hong Kong?

N.H.: The Chinese market is part of a larger Asian art ecosystem, so one thing is a slowdown in mainland China, which certainly is real. On the other hand, we saw a significant lean-in from mainland China into buying in the Hong Kong show in March this year. The Asian market beyond that is robust. The market in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and so on and so forth is large, it’s certainly growing as well. So there are challenges, for sure, I’m not going to gloss over that, but I think the general direction of travel in China and in Asia is still a net positive direction of travel.

Pressure rises on agriculture and industry to reduce pollution and cut its share of use from 59%

Water scarcity affects a fifth of EU land and almost a third of its population each year, according to the biggest survey yet of the state of its water, and as much as two-thirds of its water bodies are in bad condition.

The rising stress on supply puts industries such as textiles and agriculture at risk and increases the deadly impacts of extreme weather, the European Environment Agency said in a major report released on Tuesday.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, partly because of its proximity to the Arctic where the ice melt exposes dark, heat-absorbing, ground and amplifies warming. It has experienced more extreme weather events as a result, including more frequent and deadly floods as well as droughts.

The EEA also drew attention to excessive pollution in the bloc’s waters, also mainly caused by industry and agriculture.

Almost two-thirds of Europe’s surface water, such as lakes and rivers, were not in a good ecological state, the agency said, with countries including Sweden, Germany and Poland among the worst affected.

A major cause of the high levels of water pollution came from mercury produced by coal-fired energy production, brominated fire retardants and agricultural pesticides getting into water supplies.

EU environment ministers from 21 countries out of the 27-strong bloc wrote to the European Commission in July, at the height of the summer water supply stress, urging “concrete action” to boost water security and resilience. This followed increased tensions over water access, in particular in southern European countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain.

In some Spanish regions, residents faced restrictions in order to maintain supplies for tourists and farmers. As the emergency worsened through July and August in the Mediterranean, parts of Spain and the Greek and Italian islands also imposed strict daily water rationing.

“We are already observing more extreme droughts and we are expecting this to get worse in the future,” said Trine Christiansen, head of the EEA’s freshwater and environment group. “This is not a situation that Europe’s water policy has prepared us well for.”

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a “water resilience initiative” in September last year, but it was subsequently shelved amid ongoing protests from farmers over the potential administrative burden.

Von der Leyen has since promised a European Water Resilience Strategy in guidelines for the next commission mandate, which should begin later this year, “to ensure sources are properly managed, scarcity is addressed”.

The commission has opened more than 500 proceedings against member states for contravention of water rules since 1999.

The EEA report showed that agriculture was by far the biggest consumer of water in the EU, using 59 per cent of supply compared with 13 per cent for households and services.

Cooling of power plants accounted for the majority of water abstraction, the EEA said, but did not consume as much as agriculture because most of the water used in electricity generation is returned to the environment.

Water stress occurs when water abstraction exceeds the level of available water. According to the Water Exploitation Index, Malta and Cyprus are the most water-stressed countries in the EU.

The EEA added that in some areas of southern Europe “despite already high water use” water consumption for irrigation had continued to creep up, increasing 8 per cent since 2010.

“There is a serious need to change agricultural practices . . . to reduce pollution and adapt agriculture to lower water use,” Christiansen said.

Increasing water stress is also likely to result in ballooning costs to deal with fires, droughts and floods. The EU-wide droughts and fires in 2022 resulted in €40bn worth of damage, according to the EEA, while the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has suggested that direct damage from flooding is likely to increase six-fold by 2100.

A separate report published by the industry body Water Europe on Monday said that €255bn of investment was needed in Europe’s water infrastructure over the next six years if EU countries were to comply with EU standards on water cleanliness and supply.

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When it comes to recruiting and retaining artificial intelligence researchers, OpenAI has faced tougher competition this year from old and new rivals. Now it’s facing pressure from a very recent former employee: ex-chief technology officer Mira Murati.

Murati, whose last day was Friday, October 4 and now is as an advisor to the company, has been speaking with OpenAI employees about potentially joining her next venture, though she hasn’t disclosed exactly what that venture would be, according to two people familiar with these conversations. Spokespeople from OpenAI and representing Murati declined to comment.

Whether Murati will join former OpenAI vice president Barret Zoph at his likely new startup, found one of her own or join an existing AI developer is anyone’s guess.

But researchers may be susceptible to her pitch. OpenAI’s research organization is in upheaval after the promotion of Liam Fedus to lead post-training, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. Several researchers have asked to switch teams, as sometimes can happen in these situations, two of these people said.

Fedus is effectively taking a position previously held by Zoph, who abruptly announced his departure on Sept. 25 at the same time as Murati and research chief Bob McGrew.

In a sign of the continued fallout, Luke Metz, who worked with Fedus and Zoph at Google's AI team and moved with them to OpenAI in 2022 to develop ChatGPT, announced his departure last week as well. Like the other departures, Metz left ahead of an upcoming share buyback in which OpenAI plans to buy shares from employees.

As we reported in the aftermath of Murati’s departure, OpenAI’s finance team has been working hard to counter offers from rivals including a new startup from Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist. Given the solidarity that researchers like Zoph and McGrew appeared to show after Murati’s resignation, her recruiting efforts could further test CEO Sam Altman’s talent management skills.

Bloc officials overcome deep divisions on atomic power but finance goal commitment remains unresolved

EU ministers have nodded to support for nuclear energy for the first time as part of the bloc’s mandate for the UN climate summit, in a sign of atomic power’s rising prominence as an energy source.

Deep divisions between France and Germany held up the discussions over the EU’s negotiating stance for the COP29 gathering, but EU countries ultimately agreed that they should call to accelerate “low-emissions technologies” in line with a deal made at the previous COP28 summit that included nuclear power.

The push for more recognition of nuclear energy symbolises a shift in attitudes towards the power source in Europe, which were hardened against it following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

A group of mostly eastern European countries and France will publish a paper on Tuesday calling for Brussels to recognise the “pivotal role” of nuclear energy and ensure it is “duly integrated” in new proposals for EU energy regulation.

On the sidelines of the meeting on Monday, the Dutch and French governments also signed an agreement to increase co-operation on nuclear energy and push for more “institutional support” for nuclear power.

But several EU countries, including Germany, Austria and Denmark, fear that too much focus on nuclear could draw funds away from renewable energy as a cheaper, cleaner and faster way to cut the greenhouse gas emissions behind climate change.

“We see that nuclear has been kept alive by enormous amounts of public money without having an economically viable business model, while at the same time we see renewables costs decrease enormously,” said Leonore Gewessler, Austria’s climate minister. “Let’s put money where the most cost-efficient solution is — and that‘s renewables.”

The text agreed late on Monday sets out the EU’s negotiating mandate for the UN climate summit to be hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, next month and is intended to establish the EU as one of the most ambitious negotiating parties.

Officials involved in the discussions said the nuclear debate had distracted from wider questions about the EU’s own energy mix and its contributions to international climate finance.

Linda Kachler, executive director of the Brussels-based think-tank Strategic Perspectives, said it was an “ideological debate on who is in favour of what technology instead of the debate on how fast the EU can get rid of fossil fuels, especially from Russia”.

A European official involved in the negotiations said nuclear positions had become “religious” and that the “elephant in the room” was the lack of discussion over how much the EU would contribute in funding to poorer countries most affected by climate change.

A key focus of the summit — dubbed by its organisers as the “finance COP” — is a new target for providing climate finance for the most vulnerable countries.

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, almost 200 countries must agree a new figure for climate finance by next year, meaning that COP29 is the last chance to settle on a goal.

Positions on the shape and quantum of a potential target are still far apart, with developing countries calling for an amount in the region of $1tn-$1.3tn.

Developed countries such as those in the EU, which is the biggest donor of climate finance, have been cautious about committing more public funds without accompanying structures to increase private funding.

They have also pushed for the base of donor countries to be broadened to nations such as China, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, which are considered under UN criteria set in 1992 as “developing” countries but are now industrially and financially powerful.

Eamon Ryan, Ireland’s climate minister, said he expected Baku to be the “most difficult [COP] negotiation since Paris . . . because it is about the money.”

Several EU ministers including Ryan and French climate minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said there needed to be more focus on creating structures such as a capital markets union in Africa that would help raise money for renewable energy projects.

The EU’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said he had held “frequent fruitful discussions . . . on how to address financing” at a preliminary meeting in Baku last week.

“The way we will approach this negotiation in terms of financing is threefold,” he said. “Making sure there is more money available, and that holds good for both the public and private. Secondly making sure we don’t spread ourselves too thin but it lands with those most in need, and third lets make sure that everyone with the ability to pay actually rises to the occasion.”

Kai Mykkänen, Finland’s climate minister, said: “We can’t be in a situation forever where countries like Singapore . . . are still treated as developing countries even if their GDP per capita might be higher than that of many EU countries.”

If budget policies are unchanged, the IMF estimates that large increases in borrowing by the U.S., China and others will drive a rise in government debt to $100 trillion this year

Government debts are set to match the annual output of the global economy by the end of this decade, and could cross that threshold much sooner if economic growth is weaker or interest payments are higher than expected, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

In its twice-yearly report on government finances, the Fund said spending cuts and tax rises of an unprecedented size would be needed over the coming five to seven years to stabilize or reduce debt.

“It’s time for governments to get their house in order,” said Era Dabla-Norris, deputy director for fiscal affairs at the IMF. “For all countries, a strategic pivot is needed to reduce debt risks.”

If budget policies are unchanged, the IMF estimates that large increases in borrowing by the U.S., China and others will drive a rise in government debt to $100 trillion this year, equivalent to roughly 93% of the world’s annual production of goods and services. The Fund expects government debt to rise further, and almost match annual world output by the end of the decade.

But that could happen sooner if government projections underestimate the rise in debt, as they have done in the past. The IMF said government debts tend to be six percentage points of economic output higher than anticipated after three years.

“There are sizable upside risks,” said Dabla-Norris. “Debt could be higher than we expect.”

In an extreme scenario, government debt could hit 115% of global output in 2026, while U.S. government debt could reach 150% of the country’s gross domestic product. According to the Fund’s calculations, U.S. government debt started the century at less than 60% of GDP, a proportion that has more than doubled already.

Borrowing surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spurred a further rise in debt as many European helped households and businesses pay sharply higher energy bills.

But debt is set to continue rising in a number of large economies. In addition to the U.S. and China, the IMF expects to see increases in government debt in Brazil, France, Italy, South Africa and the U.K.. It said delaying action in those countries will make the cuts in spending and tax rises needed to stabilize borrowing even larger.

The new French government Thursday unveiled a budget that aims at narrowing France’s deficit to 5% of economic output by the end of 2025, and 3% by 2029 from 5.5% in 2023.

As it is, the IMF estimates that average cuts in spending and tax rises of between 3% and 4.5% of gross domestic product will be needed to stop the rise in debt at “high probability.” Those adjustments are larger than planned, and also larger than previous adjustments.

The Fund’s call for action to reduce borrowing comes ahead of U.S. elections that appear unlikely to produce a move in that direction. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, former president Donald Trump’s economic policy proposals would widen budget deficits by an estimated $7.5 trillion over the next decade, while vice president Kamala Harris’s plans would add $3.5 trillion.

Uncertainty about the future path of U.S. budget policy is likely to have a big impact on other governments, the IMF said. Increasingly, changes in the interest rates that governments pay are driven not by changes in their own circumstances, but by changes to the outlook for U.S. budget policy and the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

“This type of uncertainty can raise the volatility of borrowing costs and debt risks for other countries,” said Dabla-Norris.

The Fund said action to steady and lower debt was needed to create room for governments to support the transition from fossil fuels, increase military spending and care for an aging population. But while spending pressures are on the rise, the Fund noted that “political redlines on taxation have become more entrenched.”

According to the Fund, there is scope to increase tax revenues in both the U.S. and the U.K., where they are at a relatively low level as a proportion of economic output compared to rich-country peers. In the U.S., the IMF sees room to raise revenues from sales taxes, as well as taxes on higher incomes.

In poorer countries, the IMF said governments have greater scope to increase tax revenues by making collection more efficient and shrinking the size of the untaxed economy.

Jean-Pierre Mustier will continue to act as chief executive officer until Jan. 31, and remain a member of the board of directors

Atos ATO -0.83%decrease; red down pointing triangle appointed Philippe Salle as chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors as the beleaguered French IT group continues its financial restructuring.

Atos said Tuesday that Salle will assume his position as CEO from Feb. 1, 2025, while his appointment as chairman of the board of directors is effective immediately.

The company said Jean-Pierre Mustier will continue to act as chief executive officer until Jan. 31, and remain a member of the board of directors.

Salle will invest at least 9 million euros ($9.8 million) into the group as part of the financial restructuring, Atos said.