Albert Brother

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Baron Albert Frère (born February 4, 1926 in Fontaine-l'Évêque ; † December 3, 2018 ) was a Belgian financial investor . He was considered the most powerful entrepreneur in Belgium and one of the most influential in Europe.

Life

As the son of a small entrepreneur who made nails and chains, Frère joined the company immediately after school. The company became the Frère-Bourgeois trading house and the young Frère turned into a steel industrialist at the age of 30. He acquired a stake in the rolling mills of the Ruau, later in the forges of Thy-Marcinelle-Monceau and Hainaut-Sambre . At the end of the 1970s, he controlled practically the entire ironworks basin of Charleroi . He was one of the first to recognize the looming steel crisis and at the end of the 1970s he sold his steel companies to the Belgian state (see Cockerill-Sambre ).

With the capital freed up, he founded the Swiss Pargesa Holding SA together with the Canadian businessman Paul Desmarais . In 1982 Pargesa took over the Belgian holding Groupe Bruxelles Lambert (GBL). As a result, he controlled the Banque Bruxelles Lambert (BBL) and took a stake in the media group CLT ( Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télévision ), which owned the majority of the television operator RTL Group . Frère was also involved in the Belgian insurance company Royale Belge and the Belgian oil company Petrofina . In 1986 he acquired the Editions Dupuis and revitalized the publishing house through the edition of comics to become the first-class publisher in the French-speaking area.

With the sale of BBL to the Dutch ING Groep , the sale of the majority of the RTL Group to Bertelsmann AG , Royale Belge to the French AXA and the Belgian energy supply company Tractebel to the Suez Group, Frère regularly succeeded in acquiring his stake in a national Exchange company for a stake in a strong multinational corporation . In 2005 he held a 25.1% stake in Bertelsmann through his holding company , 3.6% in the oil company Total , 7.2% in the Franco-Belgian utility Suez and 26.4% in the Parisian raw materials group Imérys .

The stake in Bertelsmann was sold back on July 1, 2006, making Bertelsmann fully owned by the Mohn family and a foundation. This prevented an IPO planned by GBL.

The Frère-Bourgeois / Compagnie Nationale à Portefeuille (CNP) group is also controlled by the Albert Frère family.

In 2002 his fortune was estimated at eleven billion euros; 2007 to three billion euros. He was the only Belgian on Forbes magazine's list of the richest people in the world .

In 1994, Frère was ennobled by King Albert II of Belgium and made a baron.

On December 3, 2018, Frère died at the age of 92.

honors and awards

  • Knight of the Legion of Honor on December 19, 1978
  • Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (November 4, 1980)
  • Officer of the Legion of Honor on February 24, 1993
  • Commander of the Legion of Honor on April 10, 1997
  • Ordre grand-ducal de la couronne de chêne (Luxembourg), 1998
  • Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor on May 15, 2000
  • Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor 2014

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Information from the Federal President's Office
  2. ^ Financial investor Albert Frère is dead. In: Luxemburger Wort . December 3, 2018, accessed December 3, 2018 .