Biography | Geert Dancet — He Joined the Commission in This Building in 1986

People treat a chemicals regulator as a mid-career accident.

For Geert Dancet the accident was delayed by twenty years of Brussels files.

Official biographies record that he joined the European Commission in 1986 and spent most of that career in competition policy.

He rose from administrator to head of sector and deputy head of unit inside the Directorate-General for Competition.

In July 1997 he moved to the Directorate-General for Industry and Enterprise as head of the unit that mirrored competition and regional policy.

The Berlaymont at Rue de la Loi 200 is the Commission's public seat.

It is not the only building he worked in.

Between 1991 and 2004 the College itself sat in the Breydel building while the Berlaymont was stripped of asbestos.

A visitor should not pretend this glass X was his daily desk in 1986.

It is the building that still stands for the institution he entered that year.

The competition years matter because they explain the later chemicals job.

REACH is a market rule written as a registration duty.

The man asked to stand up the agency that would run it had already spent two decades watching how firms and member states test a Brussels file.

He was still inside the Commission when the REACH unit was created in March 2004.

The Helsinki appointment in 2007 was the first time he left the institution he had joined here.

Photo: Euro Pictures, 15 October 2022, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons