The billionaire is expected to leave an empire that has one foot in industry, particularly in Africa (the Bolloré group) and the other in the media (Vivendi). Thursday, Vincent Bolloré, who will celebrate his 70th birthday in April, must take advantage of the bicentenary of his family business to announce his retirement. According to our colleagues from around the worldhis two sons, Cyrille, 36, head of the Bolloré group and Yannick, 42, now chairman of the Vivendi supervisory board, must take over the reins of this empire, even if the details of this succession still remain. very blurry.
This departure was made in stages. Since 2018 and his indictment for corruption, in the African ports affair, Vincent Bolloré no longer held an operational position. However, he still had a term of office as a censor on the Supervisory Board of Vivendi and he is also a member of the Supervisory Board of the Canal + group.
“He wants new projects, philanthropic in particular. (…) Intellectually, he wants to leave without waiting for it to be too late”, assured the daily a close friend of the Bolloré family, while his eldest son still sketches some doubts as to the effectiveness of this departure. retired.
An appeal against a “sprawling media empire”
The latter should in any case inherit many burning issues, particularly on the media side, while the subsidiary owns the Canal + group and its C8 and CNews channels, Europe 1 radio, press titles (Prisma Media, JDD, Paris-Match…), companies in the and communication sector (Havas) or publishing (Editis).
On the eve of this handover, this Wednesday, a collective called Stop Bolloré, made up of unions, associations, media and left-wing personalities, launched an appeal to denounce the constitution by the billionaire of a “sprawling media empire” accused to serve a “reactionary ideology”.
“This concentration of media is unprecedented in our history (…). Under our incredulous eyes a retrograde revolution is taking place which it is urgent to prevent, ”argued the appeal, presented at a press conference in Paris. It is notably signed by journalists’ unions (SNJ, SNJ-CGT), associations (Attac, Maison des potes, Mrap), media (review Regards) as well as journalists and left-wing personalities (Edwy Plenel, Daniel Schneidermann, the lawyer Arié Alimi, the historians Mathilde Larrère and Laurence de Cock…).
The collective targets in particular the CNews channel, accused of feeding “an obsession with far-right themes”. “Behind these logics of concentration, of economic predation, there is a logic of political domination, of ideological oppression”, estimated at the podium of the collective Edwy Plenel, co-founder of the Mediapart investigative media. Heard in January by a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the concentration of the media, Vincent Bolloré had denied any ideological aim: “Our interest (…) is a purely economic interest”, he had assured.