Serge Dassault
Serge Dassault (born April 4, 1925 in Paris as Serge Bloch ; † May 28, 2018 there ) was a French entrepreneur and politician ( UMP / LR ). The billionaire and son of the aircraft designer and company founder Marcel Dassault and his family owned the Groupe Dassault , a conglomerate of companies specializing in the armaments and media sector.
family
His father Marcel Bloch (1892–1986) came from a Jewish family from Alsace on his father's side and from the Sephardic Allatini family on his mother's side ; his great uncle Moïse Allatini (1809-1882) from Thessaloniki was one of the richest men in the Ottoman Empire . Marcel Bloch was among others a cousin of the composer Darius Milhaud and the fighter pilot Nissim de Camondo . His mother Madeleine Minckes came from a Jewish family who immigrated to France from Lithuania . Serge Dassault's parents, he and his brother were arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944 and interned in prison and in the Drancy assembly camp. His father was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp . As a result of this experience of discrimination and persecution, his father decided to convert to Catholicism with his family in 1950 and took the name Dassault .
Serge Dassault had been married to Nicole Raffel since 1950 and had four children, including Olivier Dassault (* 1951), a member of the National Assembly since 2001 .
Entrepreneur
In 1987 Dassault inherited from his father and became General Manager of Dassault Industries. The Aviation group , which was partially nationalized under the presidency of François Mitterrand in the 1980s, was privatized again by his successor Jacques Chirac and is now 50.55% in the hands of the Dassault family and 46.32% in those of the second French aviation group EADS France . The state only holds 3.13% of the shares. Dassault was a client of Nicolas Sarkozy's law firm , which handled his father's estate.
The Dassault Group includes the aviation and defense company Dassault Aviation , best known for its Rafale and Mirage fighter jets and the Falcon business jets . Dassault Systèmes is a software development company for product lifecycle management solutions. With almost 9,000 employees and an estimated 70 publications, the press holding Socpresse does a large part of the group's public relations work. The Dassault family also holds a 6.3% share in Veolia Environnement .
In 2004 Dassault became the owner of the “Figaro” group, which publishes Figaro , the leading conservative medium in France, the magazine L'Express and numerous regional newspapers, and thus the employer of 2,700 journalists. 270 journalists - 54 at Figaro alone , including Christine Clerc - then made use of the conscience clause and left the company despite the difficult labor market situation. Dassault owns four fifths of the shares in Socpresse- Verlag in Paris and ousted the Lagardère Medias group as market leader. The group includes over 70 national and regional newspapers, including Le Figaro , Le Progrès ( Lyon ) and La Voix du Nord ( Lille ), but also Le Soir in Belgium . There are also television and women's magazines.
In 2014, Dassault was ranked fourth in France on Bloomberg's billionaires list with assets of $ 14.1 billion and 70th worldwide.
The Forbes Magazine estimated Dassault assets in 2015 to 15.3 billion US dollars and thus leads him number 62 on the list of richest people in the world.
politics
In addition to other political offices, he was mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes from 1995 to 2009 .
Dassault had been a member of the Senate for the Essonne department since 2004, and was last re-elected in 2011. When he entered the Senate, politicians, trade unionists, lawyers and journalists feared a concentration of political and media power like in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi . Most recently, he was the Senate Age President.
NGO
Dassault donated, among other things, to Reporters Without Borders .
Criminal proceedings
In 1998 Dassault was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence in Belgium as part of the Agusta-Dassault scandal . Dassault and the Italian armaments company Agusta had paid more than 160 million francs (24 million euros) to the Socialist Party, which was then ruling in Brussels, in order to get orders for combat helicopters and on-board equipment.
When he was re-elected Mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes by a very narrow margin in 2008, France's Supreme Administrative Court saw the purchase of votes as proven and canceled the election. Dassault lost the right to stand as elector for a year, but could still remain in the Senate. The investigative satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné reported in December 2012 of around 1.7 million euros that are said to have gone to Dassault's middlemen via Lebanon , who then organized the purchase of votes in Corbeil-Essonnes. Witnesses testified that Dassault paid amounts between 20 and 400 euros per vote.
After two applications for the lifting of Dassault's parliamentary immunity in the Senate had failed, on January 8, 2013 the Presidium of the Senate again rejected another motion based on suspicion of vote buying, corruption, money laundering and embezzlement by 13 votes to 12 with one abstention. This aroused outrage, especially in the left camp: Les Verts (The Greens) spoke of a scandal, the decision was "incomprehensible and shocking". Thierry Mandon of the ruling Socialist Party said no one should be above the law, parliamentary immunity must have its limits. On February 12, 2014, the Senate Presidium finally voted for the lifting of Dassault's immunity. In a complaint, he was accused of forming a criminal organization.
On February 2, 2017 Dassault was sentenced to a fine of 2 million euros and five years of eligibility for election. The reason for this conviction were foreign accounts of his group of companies, with which several million euros are said to have been concealed from the tax authorities. Since the judgment was not yet final and an appeal was likely, Dassault retained his political mandates as a senator and member of the Departmental Council of Essonne.
Web links
- Serge Dassault's biography at whoswho.de
- A big name leaves: Serge Dassault gets out of the cockpit , Die Welt , April 1, 2000
- French business boss Dassault is dead . FAZ of May 28, 2018
literature
- Claude Carlier, Serge Dassault 50 ans de défis . Editions Perrin, Paris 2002
- Anne-Marie Rocco, Serge Dassault. Armes, press, politique . Flammarion, Paris 2006
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Andreas Wrobel-Leipold: Why isn't the Bild newspaper in French? On the present and history of the daily media in France . Springer, 2010. page 29.
- ↑ http://lexpansion.lexpress.fr/entreprises/bruxelles-autorise-dassault-a-racheter-la-socpresse_1354056.html
- ↑ Nouvelle tentative de déstabilisation du PDG de Veolia , Le Monde, March 14, 2014
- ↑ FAZ , December 17, 2004: Clause of conscience: 270 journalists quit the “Figaro”
- ^ French Senate - Billionaire Dassault loses immunity , manager-magazin.de, February 13, 2014
- ^ Profile of Dassault at Forbes for 2015
- ^ Daniela Heimerl Media Democracy in French , Federal Agency for Civic Education
- ↑ http://www.liberation.fr/monde/1998/12/24/proces-agusta-dassault-et-claes-condamnes-prison-avec-sursis-pour-l-avionneur-francais-et-l-ancien -m_254244
- ↑ Power and machinations , In: Frankfurter Allgemeine January 9, 2014
- ↑ Handelsblatt: Dassault retains parliamentary immunity , In: Handelsblatt, January 8, 2014
- ↑ Dassault's immunity lifted , In: tageblatt.lu, February 12, 2014
- ^ Affaire Serge Dassault: 5 questions pour comprendre , Le Monde, 6 January 2014
- ↑ Comptes cachés: le sénateur Serge Dassault condamné à cinq ans d'inéligibilité. In: Le Parisien (online). February 2, 2017, accessed February 2, 2017 (French).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Dassault, Serge |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bloch, Serge |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French publisher and politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 4, 1925 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 28, 2018 |
| Place of death | Paris |