Too many cooks...

In the continuing saga of "Who wants to be an Avocat ?" (shouldn't that be a "millionaire" ? - I'll take both, thanks), a flurry of activity has recently occurred, none of which I've found particularly surprising, but hey, that's the cynic in me once again.

I was informed yesterday, by the Anti-Merger brigade, followed closely but belatedly (1-0 to the antis, sorry chaps) by the CNCPI bureau, that someone, somewhere, in government circles attempted to hang an amendment relating to the merger, to the end of a completely unrelated piece of legislative text relating to community harmonisation of French company law going through the Senate - these kind of tactics are fairly representative of the legislative process in France - in which, "the Government would have been authorised to issue, by means of ordinance, the necessary arrangements for the merger of the professions of Avocat and CPI..."

Shock horror !!! Errmm, no, not really, just the usual parliamentary jostling, abuse of influence, and other rather shady and undemocratic tactics that we see every day. Hmm, and the French poke fun at Italy and its successive governments - people in glass houses once again...

Needless to say, had this amendment been voted, then the government's plan was to have everything settled within 9 months or so, with or without the cooperation of the interested parties. These underhand tactics however, were apparently not to the liking of the French Economics Minister, Mme Lagarde, and a few other senators, who managed to have the amendment withdrawn before debate on the legislation commenced.

It remains to be seen who or what was responsible for proposing this amendment (if we ever find out at all, transparency of the workings of parliament not being particularly well defined).

The CNCPI Bureau offered a rather dull, and watered down "letter of information", including the text of the proposed amendment, if only to serve as counter propaganda against the Antis, in an attempt (rather feeble, IMHO) to show that it was mindful of our (the CPIs) desiderata whilst at the same time congratulating the government on having taken such an initiative.

Politics, politics. Who'd have thought that a simple thing like dealing with 790 professionals would cause so much political intrigue...

All of this does go to show that, ultimately, the fate of our profession is in the hands of those who have sufficient influence in higher political circles to add such amendments, or have them added to pending legislation by person's sympathetic to the requestee's cause. However, now that there are clearly other cooks involved in making the broth than just the two main chefs, the soup might just get burnt.

Speaking of which, time for lunch...