France wins jobs at Morgan Stanley and other investments ahead of key summit

(Updates throughout with more details and background)

* Macron prepares to kick off ‘Choose France’ event

* Morgan Stanley to create 100 new jobs in Paris

* German firm Lilium makes 400 mln euros investment

* Swiss firm KL1 makes 300 mln euros investment

* Lilium and KL1 could create over 1,000 jobs

* Le Maire to meet top Wall Street bank CEOs

PARIS, May 12 (Reuters) – France said Morgan Stanley
would open a new European office in Paris, while two
other companies announced a combined investment worth 700
million euros ($753.8 million), as the country prepared to host
a key annual foreign investment summit.

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Sunday that the new
office from Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley, dubbed as
its new ‘European campus’, would create 100 more jobs.

He added that German aviation firm Lilium would invest 400
million euros in a factory while Swiss-based firm KL1 would
commit 300 million euros of funds in a nickel refining site.
Those two investments, combined, could create more than 1,000
jobs.

Le Maire was speaking as President Emmanuel Macron was set
to host the annual ‘Choose France’ event on Monday aimed at
wooing big overseas businesses and investors.

The event comes as France, the euro zone’s second-biggest
economy, faces concerns over its budget deficit while its growth
in the first quarter was just 0.2 percent.

Le Maire said France and the European Union as a whole still
had to do more against competition from China and the United
States.

He said that at a European Union meeting in Brussels this
week he would reaffirm the need for a capital markets union to
facilitate investments into new areas of the economy such as
renewable energy and artificial intelligence.

“New industries and the new economy need massive amounts of
capital. We urgently need to take concrete steps to get the
capital markets union going. I will be able to go to Brussels at
the start of this week to once again make the case for this
capital markets union,” he told reporters.

“Europe needs money. If not, it will continue to lose out in
terms of productivity to the United States and China.”

Macron wants to burnish Paris’ role as a top European
business capital.

The closely watched Z/Yen survey of global financial
centres, published in March, put Paris in 14th place, behind
Frankfurt, with New York chosen as the world’s top financial
hub.

And last month, French oil major TotalEnergies
said it was looking at having its primary stock market listing
in New York.

Le Maire said that as part of the ‘Choose France’ event –
which last year raised 13 billion euros of foreign investments –
he would host meetings on Monday with the chief executives of JP
Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and
Bank of America, among others.

“These roundtables will give us an opportunity to once again
reach out to the big financial investors so that they can
continue to set up sites in Paris and finance the major
industrial and economic projects on which we are working with
the President,” said Le Maire.

($1 = 0.9286 euros)
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta;
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Pineau; editing by Clelia
Oziel)