France finance chief exits
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March 27, 2000: 8:16 a.m. ET
Sautter, irked by unions, heads slate of departures at top of Jospin team
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LONDON (CNNfn) - French Finance Minster Christian Sautter resigned Monday, after union protests led to the collapse of his planned tax reform, sparking an array of departures in the first broad shake-up of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's three-year-old administration.
The government said Laurent Fabius, who served as prime minister under President Francois Mitterrand in the mid-1980s, would take over from Sautter.
The resignation, which was expected, comes just five months after Sautter succeeded Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who stepped down amid a suspected job scam. In a statement, Sautter said he tendered his resignation to Jospin a week ago.
Culture Minister Catherine Trautmann, Education Minister Claude Allegre and Civil Service Minister Emile Zuccarelli also resigned Monday.
The return of 53-year-old Fabius marks his political comeback. Currently serving in the largely ceremonial post of speaker of the National Assembly, Fabius was recently cleared of charges that linked him to a long-running scandal over AIDS-tainted blood.
Sautter said he took office with a simple goal: to reinvigorate the public service sector. A keystone of his plan was a broad simplification of the tax code, by which all fiscal controls would be placed under a single government department - a practice already commonplace elsewhere in Europe, he said.
"I underestimated the conservativeness of union organizations," Sautter said in his statement.
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