French IT company CapGemini usually avoids the global spotlight despite its international presence but a link with the US's immigration crackdown impelled its Egyptian-born chief executive to act.
A decision to pull back from the US venture came from 65-year old Aiman Ezzat. He acted when media reports drew his attention to a contract Capgemini Government Solutions (CGS) signed with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year.
Mr Ezzat's crisis management skills have been generally well received in France. Senior officials and MPs had expressed concern about the connection between CapGemini, which is listed on the country's main stock market index, and ICE.
The agency is embroiled in controversy over what critics said were heavy handed arrests and accusations of extrajudicial killing that played out on news feeds around the world.
Described in an op-ed published Sunday by business daily Les Echos as a specialist of "arriving in the wrong place at the wrong time," Mr Ezzat "always comes out on top".
Born in the north-eastern Egyptian city of Ismailia on the Suez Canal, he arrived aged nine in France, where he would study engineering. After six years at US technology company IBM, he joined CapGemini in 1991. He briefly left the company in 2000 to join a start-up in the US, just before the dotcom bubble burst.
A 'citizen of the world'
In 2008, Mr Ezzat was appointed head of CapGemini's financial services in the middle of a financial meltdown. In 2020, he became group chief executive at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and oversaw the integration of engineering consulting firm Altran.
According to a profile of Mr Ezzat published in December by French magazine Challenges, in the first three years of his chief executive mandate, turnover increased by 57 per cent to €22 billion ($26 billion). CapGemini's workforce swelled by 64 per cent to 360,000 people. Share prices doubled. "I always arrive in the middle of crises," Mr Ezzat told Challenges.
He is described as obsessed with the "internationalisation" of CapGemini. Privately, he is said to love Japanese and Indian cultures. Philippe Grangeon, former head of communications at CapGemini, is quoted as saying of Mr Ezzat: "He is not part of the French establishment. He is a citizen of the world with internationalist values."
His management style is described as direct and sometimes brutal. Before his appointment as chief executive, he worked two years as delegate chief executive alongside Thierry Delaporte, who has since left CapGemini. They were reportedly described as: "Aiman barks and Thierry bites."
For Mr Ezzat, the latest crisis hit on January 26, when TV network France 2 broadcast a story on prime-time evening news titled "a French flagship [company] at the service of ICE" revealing that contracts signed between CapGemini and ICE were worth more than €300 million ($354 million) included operating a telephone hotline launched by US President Donald Trump for victims of crimes committed by foreigners.
CapGemini also helped ICE in identifying and locating migrants, a practice known as skip tracing. The contract promised financial bonuses based on "success rate in verifying alien addresses".
'Illegal aliens'
The report pointed at CapGemini recently erasing the following statement from its website: "CapGemini is working closely with ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations] to help minimise the time required and the cost incurred to remove all removable illegal aliens from the US."
CapGemini initially stalled in the face of the storm. Management issued a statement that said that it had no details on its ICE contracts because US legal constraints on classified federal contracts prevented it from exercising "appropriate control" over its operations.
A national uproar ensued. French union CGT wrote to Mr Ezzat calling for CapGemini to cease work with US federal institutions and audit all contracts since 2007. “Contracts of French groups deserve full vigilance," Minister of Armed Forces Catherine Vautrin said on radio RTL, adding that "respect for human rights is an issue."
Writing on LinkedIn in English, Mr Ezzat said that the company had been recently made aware, through public sources, of the nature of a contract awarded to CGS by the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2025.
"The nature and scope of this work has raised questions compared to what we typically do as a business and technology firm," he said. He reiterated that CapGemini Group could not access information related to CGS's technical operations.
Over the weekend, CapGemini's board of directors held an emergency meeting during which they told Mr Ezzat that a sale of CGS would be the best option. The group issued a statement in which it said that the sales process of CGS, "which represents 0.4 per cent of the group's estimated revenue in 2025 (less than 2 per cent of its revenue in the United States), will be initiated immediately."
On Monday, Capgemini shares rose by as much as 2 per cent.
