The postponement of the retirement age for Vincent Bolloré? The bicentenary of the family business falls on Thursday and this date was to mark the withdrawal of the billionaire and media magnate, but the vagueness remains on his intentions.
“It is impossible to know when he will decide to completely realize” his withdrawal, confides to AFP a connoisseur of the Bolloré universe.
“Anyway, even if he realizes it, he will always keep the control tower of the Compagnie de l’Odet” which he chairs, this source believes.
This holding is at the head of the Bolloré empire, shaped in forty years through acquisitions and which now totals 80,000 employees and 24 billion euros in annual revenue.
An empire anchored on the one hand in industry (Bolloré group in transport and logistics) and on the other in the media (Vivendi), of which it is a giant.
Last week, BFM Business had already said that the handover would be “postponed”.
Vincent Bolloré, 70 years old in April, had however announced for a long time that his retirement would coincide with the 200 years of the company.
“I will leave my place (…) when we celebrate the bicentenary of the group”, he repeated on January 19 before a senatorial commission of inquiry into the concentration of the media.
Finally, this bicentenary will be celebrated twice: Thursday in Ergué-Gabéric, near Quimper, where the head office of the Compagnie de l’Odet is located, then in July, with great fanfare with several hundred people.
Informal adviser
“Today, I finish giving up my position as adviser, following having been a leader until three years ago. My family agreed to continue this industrial saga. She will represent the seventh generation,” added Vincent Bolloré before the senators.
From the point of view of titles, the patriarch has already retired in favor of two of his children: Yannick, 42, CEO of Havas since 2013, became chairman of the supervisory board of Vivendi in 2018, and Cyrille, 36, took the reins of the Bolloré group in March 2019.
But in fact, Vincent Bolloré is still there.
“He has no title but we know that he influences major strategic decisions”, underlines a close source, for whom the businessman will hold this role of informal adviser to the group “for an indefinite time”, which will depend on “the evolution of the problems”.
Because several burning issues remain to be completed: acquiring the entire capital of the Lagardère group, preventing the American investment fund KKR from gaining a foothold in Telecom Italia – of which Vivendi is the largest shareholder – and convincing the Spanish government to let Vivendi take nearly 30 % of the capital of the media group Prisa, owner of the daily The countrycompared to 9.9% currently.
Not to mention the planned sale of the group’s logistics branch in Africa, undermined by several legal proceedings, which Vincent Bolloré intends to carry out, like so many other operations before.
“Reactionary ideology”
Le Breton likes to recall that in the early 1980s, when he got down to the recovery of the family stationery, it “employed just under 800 people”.
Since then, the group has acquired a colossal weight in the media, sometimes at the cost of brutal reorganizations: audiovisual (group Canal+ and its chains C8 and CNewsradio Europe 1), press (Prisma Media, the leading group of magazines in France, JDD, Paris Match, Rush in Spain), and communication (Havas), publishing (Editis) or telecoms (Telecom Italia).
A worrying concentration, a few weeks before the presidential election.
Yesterday, Wednesday, a collective called “Stop Bolloré”, made up of unions, associations, media and left-wing personalities, launched an appeal to denounce the constitution of a “sprawling media empire” accused of serving a “reactionary ideology”.
The collective aims in particular CNews, accused of nurturing “an obsession with far-right themes”. Between 2019 and 2021, it hosted journalist Eric Zemmour, now a far-right presidential candidate.
Facing the senators, Vincent Bolloré had denied any political objective in his acquisition strategy: “our interest (is) purely economic”.
