Fred has been a committer on m2e for a long time and produced a lot of good code, has been involved in transversal design considerations, reviews almost all incoming patches...
Of all regular long-term contributors, he's currently the only one reacting to community questions and suggestions on the mailing-list. So as the only "historical" active committer, it would be in the best interest of the project that Fred becomes officially the project lead and can help even more m2e moving forward.