OVER the past three years, the French authorities have given the country’s intelligence agencies a new mission — to protect Gallic firms.

The so-called economic war is now a central theme for French spies, who have been told to combine financial intelligence with their traditional battle against terrorism, rogue states and revolutionaries.

The man overseeing these moves is Alain Juillet, a former member of the Direction Générale de la Securité Extérieure (DGSE), the French equivalent of MI6.

In 2003, he was appointed to the newly created post of Head of Economic Intelligence in France.

M Juillet describes his role as “mastering and protecting strategic information that can enable the head of a company to optimise his decisions”.

“We must identify everything that is already being done in terms of economic intelligence in the Civil Service,” he says. “Then we have to co-ordinate it and suggest improvements whenever there is a failing in the procedures.”

The French Government’s aim is to cast the economic intelligence net beyond its old limit in the struggle against industrial espionage.

The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the equivalent of MI5, for example, has trained agents to detect early signs of a hostile takeover bid for a French company.

The third French spy agency, les Renseignements Généraux (RG), whose main task is to keep an eye on subversive movements, has also begun to tackle economic intelligence.

About 100 of its spies are dedicated to providing help for small and medium-sized companies.

Six of them are in western France and their job is to “alert, for example, a firm in Nantes that Chinese investors are present in a Parisian investment fund”, a spokesman for RG said last month.

The implication was that, if the fund approached the company, it should be rebuffed.