
.
.Albert
FRERE
Albert, Baron Frère
(born February 4, 1926 in Fontaine-l'Evêque near Charleroi,
Belgium) is a Belgian businessman and the richest man in Belgium.
Frère grew up as a son of a nail
merchant and helped in the business since an early age. His father
died when Frère was 17; Frère had to leave school and run the
family business by himself. At the age of 30, he started investing
in Belgian steel factories and by the end of the 1970s he
practically controlled the whole steel industry in the region of
Charleroi. He foresaw the coming steel crisis of the late 1970s
and sold his enterprises to the Belgian state after merging them
with the competing steel firm Cockerill to create
Cockerill-Sambre.
Frère used the proceeds from this
sale to build an investment empire around the Swiss holding
company Pargesa which he founded with the Canadian investor Paul
Desmarais. Pargesa took over the Belgian holding company Groupe
Bruxelles Lambert in 1982 and over the year added significant
stakes in such wide ranging Belgian companies as Petrofina, Royale
Belge Insurance, Compagnie Luxembourgoise de Télédiffusion (CLT),
and Tractebel. He actively promoted international consolidation of
the sectors in which he was involved, selling Banque Bruxelles
Lambert to ING Group, Royale Belge to Axa, Tractebel to Suez,
Petrofina to Total S.A., and RTL to Bertelsmann.
Frère is married and has three
children. In 2002, he received the title of baron from the Belgian
king Albert II. He is a co-owner, together with Bernard Arnault of
LVMH, of the Château Cheval Blanc winery near Bordeaux. He is a
member of the Cercle Gaulois.
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