French billionaire and media mogul Vincent Bolloré officially retired on Thursday this week, the day of the family business bicentenary, without having clearly designated his successor. It came just a day after a group launched an appeal to denounce his increasingly "tentacular" media empire.
"It is impossible to know when he will decide to complete his withdrawal," a source told French news agency AFP, adding that "even if he does, he will still keep the control tower of the Compagnie de l'Odet" which he presides.
The holding company is at the head of the Bolloré empire, which has been built up over 40 years through a series of acquisitions and which now has 80,000 employees and annual revenues of 24 billion euros.
The empire is anchored in industry (Bolloré group in transport and logistics) and the media (Vivendi).
Vincent Bolloré, who turns 70 in April this year, had announced long ago that his retirement would coincide with his company's 200th anniversary.
"I will leave my place [...] when we celebrate the bicentenary of the group," he told a Senate enquiry commission on media concentration last month.
Informal advisor
"Today, I'm finishing my job as a councillor, having been a manager up until three years ago," he told senators. "My family has agreed to continue this industrial saga. They will represent the seventh generation."
He has already stepped aside in favour of two of his children. Yannick, 42, CEO of Havas since 2013, became chairman of Vivendi's supervisory board in 2018, and Cyrille, 36, took the reins of the Bolloré group in March 2019.
In practice, Vincent Bolloré is still there.
"He has no title but we know that he influences major strategic decisions", said a close source. Bolloré will allegedly keep the role of informal adviser to the group "for an indefinite time" depending on how "problems evolve".
A number of burning issues have to be resolved: acquiring the entire capital of French group Lagardère and preventing the American investment fund KKR from gaining a foothold in Telecom Italia (of which Vivendi is the largest shareholder). Bolloré's group also has to convince the Spanish government to allow Vivendi to increase its 9.9 percent stake in the media group Prisa, owner of the daily El Pais, to 30 percent.
And then there's the planned sale of the group's logistics branch in Africa, which is plagued by several lawsuits.
Concentration of media power
Since the 1980s, the group has gradually taken control of a chunk of French media, sometimes involving brutal reshuffles: audiovisual (Canal+ group and its channels C8 and CNews, Europe 1 radio), press (Prisma Media, the leading magazine group in France, JDD, Paris-Match, Prisa in Spain), advertising and communication (Havas), publishing (Editis) and telecoms (Telecom Italia).
This concentration has caused concern, particularly just a few weeks ahead of the presidential election in France.
On Wednesday, a group called "Stop Bolloré", made up of unions, associations, media and left-wing personalities, launched an appeal to denounce the creation of a "tentacular media empire" accused of serving a "reactionary ideology".
"Behind this logic of concentration and economic predation, there is a logic of political domination," said Edwy Plenel, co-founder of the investigative media Mediapart.
The collective is targeting CNews in particular, accused of feeding "an obsession with far-right themes". Between 2019 and 2021, one of its hosts was journalist and polemicist Eric Zemmour, now a populist presidential candidate.
Questioned by senators, Bolloré denied his acquisition strategy was politically motivated. "Our interest (is) purely economic", he claimed.
(with AFP)
