Former Credit Suisse Tidjane Thiam chief will run for president in the upcoming Ivory Coast election, his party confirmed.
The 62 -year -old Tiam was the only candidate to represent the country's main opposition party, PDCI.
Tiam has spent the last two decades living abroad and had to give up his French citizenship in order to be able to stand in the presidential election.
The former minister has held directorial positions in leading international businesses such as Aviva, Prudecial and Credit Suis, although he resigned from the last after a spy scandal.
Political scientist Jeffrey Quao told the AFP news agency that Tiam is not “well known to Ivorians” after spending more than 20 years outside the country by pursuing his business career and therefore will have a strong campaign to win the October elections.
The RHDP management party has not yet announced its candidate, but the current president, 83-year-old Alasan Owatara, said he would like to run for what would be a fourth term in service.
Three other prominent figures, including former President Laurent Gbagbo, have been banned from governing, AFP reports.
Tiam had something like a plaid career.
After becoming the first Ivorian to pass the entrance exam at the prestigious French Polytechnic School of Polytechnic, he returned to Kot D'Ivory and undertook politics.
In 1998, at the age of 36, he became Minister of Planning before the PDCI was removed from the coup of next year.
He then moved abroad and pursued a successful business career.
In 2009, he became the first black man to head the FTSE 100 Stock Exchange company in the UK when he was appointed CEO of the Prudential Insurance Company.
However, he was later counted by a financial regulator for not opening for planned ingestion.
After five years as the head of the Swiss bank loan Suisse, he was forced to resign in 2020 after being accused of spying on two colleagues by the formators he denied.
He is well connected in the West African political circles-he is the great-priority of the first President of the Cotta d'Ivoire Felix Hufouway-Bine, while his uncle Habib Tiam was Prime Minister in Senegal, twice, covering a total of nine years.