Biography | Geert Dancet — He Opened the Chemicals Agency on Annankatu the Day REACH Came Into Force

People treat the European Chemicals Agency as a building that has always sat on Helsinki's waterfront.

It did not.

For its first twelve years the agency lived at Annankatu 18, a former print works and Varma headquarters facing Old Church Park in Kamppi.

Geert Dancet took office there on 1 June 2007.

That was the day Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006, REACH, entered into force.

The Commission had named him interim Executive Director in January 2007 and seconded a first group of officials from Brussels to stand the house up.

An official ECHA report later put the seconded group at 37 experienced staff.

A later public summary rounded the opening party to about 40.

Dancet was not a chemist.

He was a Belgian economist, born in 1956, who had studied economics, econometrics and philosophy at the University of Louvain and spent most of two decades inside the Commission's competition and enterprise directorates.

From March 2004 he had headed the new REACH unit in DG Enterprise and Industry, the desk that shepherded the regulation through the Council and the Parliament and then planned the agency that would have to run it.

Helsinki was the price of that plan.

Finland had won the seat of the agency during the 2003 negotiations on the chemicals package.

Annankatu 18 entered the site search late, after Varma decided to leave for Ruoholahti.

The building Dancet walked into was not purpose-built for a regulator.

It was an office block that had to grow an IT system able to take registrations on every substance manufactured or imported in the Union above a one-tonne threshold.

POLITICO found him already in the building in April 2007, wiring the house before the legal start date.

The Management Board held its constitutive meeting three weeks after 1 June and elected Jukka Malm of Finland as chair.

Dancet remained interim until 17 December 2007, when the same board appointed him Executive Director for five years, after a hearing in the European Parliament.

The first five-year term was renewed in 2012.

He left on 31 December 2017.

By then ECHA had more than 500 staff and had taken on CLP, the Biocidal Products Regulation and the PIC export-notification rules as well as REACH.

The agency moved in 2020 to a new pair of buildings at Telakkakatu 6 in the old shipyard district.

Annankatu 18 was rebuilt again and opened in December 2022 as the Scandic Helsinki Hub hotel.

A visitor standing on the pavement now sees a hotel canopy, not a chemicals desk.

The date that still belongs to this plot is 1 June 2007, when an economist from Louvain opened a regulator that did not yet have its own accounts.

Photo: Kaihsu Tai, 13 January 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons