Albert Frère: Belgium's richest man and stalwart of European business who drew comparisons to Warren Buffett

Albert Frère was the Belgian billionaire whose investments shaped some of Europe’s largest companies in more than half a century of deal-making.

Frère, who has died aged 92, became Belgium’s richest man by turning his family’s chains-and-nails manufacturing business into an empire stretching from energy to alcohol. He held interests in oil producer Total, cement-maker LafargeHolcim, Adidas, distiller Pernod Ricard and energy company Engie.

The tycoon didn’t operate alone. Frère had a long term partnership with Canada’s Desmarais family, with whom he controlled Pargesa Holding, a company in Geneva that in turn owns half of Brussels-based GBL, the vehicle that holds his investments in publicly traded companies. In 2015, at age 89, Frère stepped down as CEO of Groupe Bruxelles and resigned from the board, while also quitting as vice chairman of Pargesa.

Frère helped to broker some of France’s biggest transactions, including the merger of Suez SA and state-controlled Gaz de France SA in the nation’s third biggest takeover at the time.

The original deal, announced in February 2006, was deadlocked by political haggling and shareholder objections, and it concluded more than a year later, following a meeting between Frère and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, according the La Tribune newspaper. The combined company is now named Engie SA.

In the 1980s, Frère became the largest shareholder in the Belgian oil producer Petrofina SA, acquiring as much as 41 per cent of the company. After failing to interest Elf Aquitaine SA, France’s then-largest oil company, in a takeover of Petrofina, he turned to smaller rival Total instead. A merged Petrofina and Total later acquired Elf.

He had net assets worth £5bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Frère often swapped big stakes in small companies for pieces of bigger ones. He did just that in 1996 when he sold his 25 per cent stake in Belgian utility Tractebel SA to a unit of Suez, which later led to a merger of the two companies.

Born in 1926, in the Belgian village of Fontaine-L’Eveque, Frère was the youngest of three children. His father, Oscar, died when Albert was four, leaving his mother, Madeleine, in charge of the family nail-and-chain business.

Frère’s formal education ended at high school. He joined the family company full time in 1947 at age 21, according to a 1997 biography by Joseph Alan-Fralon. The operation had slowed to a near-standstill under German occupation in the early 1940s.

After the war, Frère revived sales by sending envoys to sell his family’s products across Belgium, benefiting from a building boom. By the time he was 28, Frère used profits from the family business to acquire a steel mill in Charleroi, the first of a series of purchases that would consolidate much of Belgium’s steel industry.

Frère didn’t limit his financial prowess to Belgium and France. In 2001, he swapped his 30 per cent holding in Luxembourg-based broadcaster RTL Group for a 25 percent stake in German media company Bertelsmann AG. In making the trade, he wrote a clause into the contract giving him the right to sell his Bertelsmann shares on the stock market.

In 2006, he approached the Mohn family, which controls Bertelsmann, seeking €4.5bn for his shares. He got his price after announcing plans to sell his stake against the wishes of some Mohn family members who didn’t want the company to go public.

Henry Kravis said the deal Frère did with RTL and Bertelsmann was “probably one of the best I’ve ever seen, ever”.

Frère’s prescient purchases and tendency to hold positions for decades rather than years prompted comparisons to Warren Buffett, the billionaire chair of Berkshire Hathaway.

“He doesn’t really care about short term fluctuations,” said Tom Simonts, an analyst at KBC Securities in Brussels. “He’s more or less the Warren Buffett of Belgium.”

Named a baron by Belgium’s King Albert II in 1994, Frère was friends with monarchs, heads of state and industry leaders. With business partner Arnault, Frère owned half of the fabled Chateau Cheval Blanc vineyard in Saint-Emilion, near Bordeaux.

He often conducted business deals in informal settings, such as when he bought a stake in Pernod Ricard after a 2006 hunting trip with its then chief Patrick Ricard in northern France. Pursuing his favourite sport, the Belgian baron hunted red-legged partridge with Kravis and King Juan Carlos I of Spain.

“I want to be remembered as someone who had marked their passage in the world,” Frère said in a 2007 interview in his penthouse near Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. “To leave something, a good souvenir, is all that I ask.”

His son, Gerald Frère, is chair of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert and vice chair of Pargesa. Frère’s daughter, Segolene Gallienne, sits on the board of both companies, and her husband, Ian Gallienne, is co-chief executive of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert. His other son, Charles-Albert, died in a car crash in 1999 aged 19.

Albert Frère, Belgian businessman, born 4 February 1926, died 3 December 2018

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