Biography|Arnaud Feist — The February Afternoon Brussels Airport Company Named Him CEO

Macquarie went looking outside the building.

The person it confirmed on 15 February 2010 was already inside it.

That Monday, Trends reported from a named source that Brussels Airport Company had chosen Arnaud Feist, then 42 and still carrying the CFO title, as chief executive.

Dutch Wikipedia, citing the same day's report, repeats the date. French Wikipedia follows it.

The vacancy was not orderly. On 9 September 2009, CEO Wilfried Van Assche announced his resignation. He had run the operator since 2005. Feist, already on the executive committee, became interim chair of that committee the same month.

The Australian shareholder then hired a search firm. Marcel Buelens, the ousted chief at Charleroi, was among the names in the papers. Six months later the board stayed with the interim.

La Libre, writing thirteen months after the appointment, said the new chief kept a low public profile at first because tariff talks with the airlines were underway.

The job he inherited was a privatized national airport still rebuilding long-haul after the Sabena collapse, with Macquarie as controlling shareholder and the Belgian state still on the register.

He has not left the seat. On 13 May 2025 the shareholders' meeting and the board extended the mandate by six years, a decision Flows reported the same month.

That later extension belongs to another day. This pin is the February afternoon the search ended, on the same field where he had arrived as a finance director in 2005.

The terminal a visitor walks through is not the boardroom. It is the public face of the company that took the decision.

Photo: Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons