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Last year corporate raider Vincent Bolloré celebrated his supposed retirement from his family-owned media and logistics empire. But that has not stopped him from making waves in French business and politics.
The 71-year-old conservative billionaire is now mounting an assault on a bastion of French mainstream media: the prominent weekly newspaper, the Journal du Dimanche. His allies have appointed the controversial former editor of a far-right magazine to run the paper, prompting outraged journalists to strike and triggering a wave of concern from leftwing and centrist politicians and celebrities.
Sitting out retirement on a beach was probably never on the cards for the financier whose name has become synonymous with bare-knuckled dealmaking and proximity to power (he is a close friend of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who celebrated his 2007 election victory on the billionaire’s yacht).
Nicknamed the “little prince of cash flow” for his business acumen, Bolloré celebrated his departure from the family company with a Catholic mass and a party in his home region of Brittany. A devout Catholic, Bolloré wore traditional Breton clothes as bagpipes played at the event timed to coincide with the group’s 200-year anniversary.
One of his sons, Yannick Bolloré, who replaced his father at the helm of the family’s media group Vivendi, called the ceremony a “moving and really joyful moment” during which retired factory workers and managers feted the patriarch. “Working with a genius is always wonderful,” he told the Financial Times.
Asked about the nomination to the JDD of editor Geoffroy Lejeune, whose last magazine was convicted for running afoul of France’s hate speech laws, the younger Bolloré insisted it had nothing to do with Vivendi or his father.
Vivendi has yet to finalise its acquisition of the JDD’s parent company Lagardère, he said, so legally could not have made the choice. “We had no part in the decision,” he said.
But many in Paris media and business circles see the hand of Bolloré behind the move to install Lejeune. After all, they point out, the tycoon has form. In the past six years, Bolloré has put a conservative stamp on the media outlets he controls in what people who know him say is a concerted strategy to build a counterweight to what he sees as the leftist bias of French media.
Yet that agenda is never admitted openly. When senators grilled him last year in hearings over the concentration of media ownership, Bolloré denied any desire to influence politics and minimised his role. “Our interests are not political and not ideological, it is always and only economic,” he said. “I am answering your questions only as an individual. I have no title nor power at Vivendi, Bolloré . . . and even less at Lagardère.”
One banker marvels at the performance: “He advances wearing a mask . . . There is an 18th-century aspect to him: I will strangle you but with a form of grace and elegance.”
The most emblematic example of Bolloré’s rightwing media push came when Vivendi gutted the staff of 24-hour news channel i-Télé in 2016. It was rebranded as CNews, a Fox News-like outlet that has since become an incubator for rightwing personalities, including the 2022 presidential hopeful Éric Zemmour. Lejeune has also appeared on the station frequently. In 2021, stars from CNews were parachuted into Lagardère’s Europe 1 radio station after Vivendi built up its Lagardère stake to more than 40 per cent.
CNews also bears traces of Bolloré’s faith, notably a Sunday show called In Search of Spirituality. “The assignment Vincent Bolloré gave me was to bring spirituality back to the TV screen,” host Aymeric Pourbaix told La Croix magazine in 2021.
Keeping his family’s business going is another of Bolloré’s obsessions. He started his career as a banker, but when the family business making bibles and cigarette paper ran into trouble in the 1980s, the young Bolloré saved it. He later branched out in Africa to build an extensive ports and logistics network that relied on close ties with political leaders in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria.
He has had only a few failures as he built a fortune now estimated at around $10bn: Vivendi’s Telecom Italia stake has shrunk massively in value and a costly venture in electric batteries did not pan out.
People who know him say he is charming and funny, attributes he uses to get his way. “Everyone knows he is a serial seducer but he is so good at it, you doubt yourself for a moment and think this time is different,” says one person.
In business, he is rational and calculated, buying and selling assets with little emotion. Since 2022, Bolloré Group — the infrastructure-focused family holding managed by another son, Cyrille — has divested the African and logistics business the patriarch spent decades building.
The Africa business has also brought legal woes for the billionaire: he has been under investigation by French prosecutors since 2018 for alleged bribery of local officials and spent time in police custody for questioning. He has denied wrongdoing.
Back at the JDD, the journalists have few illusions that they can win against Bolloré. Most expect Lejeune to remain as editor and predict a staff exodus, as happened at CNews and Europe 1. After all, this is a man whose family’s longstanding motto since 1789 is: “Kneel before God, stand before men.”
leila.abboud@ft.com, adrienne.klasa@ft.com
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