Page 22 - FINAT Yearbook 2019

50 Golden Years
FIVE DECADES OF FINAT – LEJEUNE PARTNERSHIP
While FINAT and Labelexpo are celebrating their 60th and 40th anniversaries, another anniversary passed by relatively unnoticed. This summer, during 2019, it was exactly 50 years since the infant associa- tion FINAT contracted ‘Bureau Le Jeune’, as it was then called, as its permanent office. So, today, FINAT and ‘Lejeune’ have half a century of shared European history, shared memories and shared family heri- tage, with Mans and his son Jules as the successive directors during that period. On the request of former FINAT Board member Berhard Grob of Edale, FINAT’s MD Jules Lejeune shared some of his memories in the context of post war European history.
I have recounted the story of the history of the founding of my dad’s company many times. After he graduated from Tilburg University in The Netherlands, he got a job as ‘cabinet chief’ for Prof. Pieter Blaisse, a Dutch politician in the Catholic People’s Party (KVP) who was one of the pioneers of foreign trade policy and international collaboration. In that capacity,
Mr. Blaisse was appointed as member of the European Parliament (those were the days when there were no European elections), where he subsequently became vice-chairman and chairman of the parliamentary committee for the internal European market (a position he held from 1961-1967).
22 | FINAT YEARBOOK 2019