Biography|Arnaud Feist — The October Day BIAC Made Him Chief Financial Officer

The airport people remember is the one he later ran.

The job that put him on the site began as a finance brief.

On 30 September 2005, Luchtvaartnieuws reported that the Belgian airport operator BIAC had named Arnaud Feist its new chief financial officer, succeeding Michel Allé, who was leaving for the finance directorate of SNCB Holding.

The same dispatch said Feist would take the post the next day, 1 October 2005.

A 2011 La Libre profile compresses the hiring into a single morning: a curriculum vitae sent to a headhunter at ten o'clock, a return call forty-five minutes later, and the CFO-and-ICT seat confirmed by late September.

The two accounts agree on the month. The trade brief is the one that dates the first official day.

BIAC had just come through privatization. Macquarie was the controlling private shareholder. The operator still used the old initials; Brussels Airport Company as a name came later.

Feist arrived as a commercial engineer with a tax-law master's and a decade of packaging-industry finance behind him, including mergers work at SCA. The 2005 brief also listed Coopers & Lybrand and Swift.

It called him 38. That is the only age the appointment notice gives.

The brief was not a passenger-facing job. As a member of the management board he took finance, ICT, procurement, and risk — the back office of a newly private national airport, not the piers.

Four years later that back office would be the path to the top job. In 2005 it was only a change of industry, from cardboard plants to a field at Zaventem.

The pin is the public terminal, not a private office. The 2005 administration building sat on the airport estate; the terminal is the place a visitor can still walk.

Photo: Szilas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons