Thierry Lebeaux, Ex-VP Regulatory Affairs and Head of EU Affairs, JTI – Geneva Headquarters

Thierry Lebeaux has over 25 years’ experience in public affairs and political communications. After graduating in economics and international relations in the University of Lille, he specialized in European studies in the College of Europe of Bruges.

Later he started his career working for seven years in the European Commission in the Directorate General for Internal Market dealing, dealing matters related to cross border trade in services (then article 59 of the Treaty) and in competition cases the service industry.

Thierry then run a number of consultancy offices in Brussels for 15 years, advising prestigious clients such as Nomura, Lloyds TSB, American express, G4S and the Cash-In-Transit trade association ESTA, Bunge, the International Trademark Association and many others on EU issues. He has run successfully a number of high level EU campaigns and developed public affairs applications in relation to competition issues and rule of law campaigns in relation to EU enlargement and in the context of the negotiation of EU association agreements with third countries or WTO accession.

In 2009, Thierry joined Japan Tobacco International as Vice-President EU Affairs to run their EU office ahead of the revision of the tobacco products directive. He addressed a number of major threats to the industry such new products restrictions and plain packaging for tobacco products.

Since the end of 2013, Thierry has returned to consultancy, working for Elipse and advising economic operators and NGOs on highly sensitive issues such as those related to the extension of tobacco-like measures (e.g. plain packaging) to other consumer products. He specializes in the assessment of the compatibility of such measures with the EU Acquis, such as trademark law and the free movements of goods (e.g. in the context of the Irish standardisation packaging initiative).