Gilles Cojan

About Gilles Cojan

Gilles Cojan is a long-standing governance figure at Elior Group, where he held senior leadership responsibilities for many years. He graduated from ESSEC Business School in 1977 and began his career in 1978 at the pharmaceutical group Servier as Treasurer. He then joined Banque Transatlantique, where he became Chief Executive Officer of its subsidiary GTI Finance, before moving to Valeo in 1990 as head of the Financing and Treasury department. This early career built a strong foundation in corporate finance, liquidity management, funding structures, and capital transactions. In 1992, Gilles Cojan joined Elior, a group that was still being shaped alongside its founders, Robert Zolade and Francis Markus. He successively served as Chief Financial Officer, then as CEO of Elior International and Group Chief Strategy Officer. He was instrumental in the success of the leveraged employee buyout organized in 1992 and completed in 1996, and later in the two successive LBOs involving the contract catering and concession catering businesses, which led to the creation of Elior Group in 1997. From that point onward, he was directly involved in the Group’s international expansion strategy, supporting its entry into the UK, Spanish, and Italian markets. His track record also includes several major strategic transactions. He was behind the 2001 partnership with Spain-based Areas, which strengthened Elior’s position in concession catering, and the 2013 alliance with the founder of THS, which supported Elior’s rapid development in the United States. In 2000, he oversaw Elior’s IPO, and in 2006 he helped organize, together with Robert Zolade, the company’s delisting and a new LBO aimed at accelerating growth. In 2010, he helped create the “services” division, now an integral part of Elior Group. Since 2007, he has also been Chief Executive Officer of BIM, Elior Group’s principal shareholder. After serving on the Board of Directors and being appointed Vice-Chairman in 2017, he chaired Elior Group’s Board of Directors from November 1, 2017 to June 30, 2022.