Antoine Gaudino

"Antoine Gaudino,"

"To understand the reasons for this enrichment, Antoine Gaudino dissected the operations that took place in 1993 and 1994 between the Compagnie Financière du Nord and the Worms group, which sold its subsidiary Financière Truffaut to the former for 800 million francs. Through a complicated scheme, involving mergers, capital reductions, asset transfers from Jacques Rober, Guinness France between Financière Agache on one side, Christian Dior on the other, latent losses would have been lodged with Christian Dior (at the bottom of the cascade) and capital gains with Financière Agache (at the top), according to Antoine Gaudino. He estimates that the "capital gain that should have been recorded in favor of [...] Christian Dior" was 573.6 million francs and claims that it "was diverted by Financière Agache during its intervention on April 29, 1994, just before Christian Dior took over Guinness France.""

"While Bernard Arnault, as we will see, would mobilize intelligence agency Kroll Associates to reveal all the small and big secrets of his opponent, François Pinault, on the other hand, would turn to Antoine Gaudino to uncover and, if possible, make known the practices he supposed to be diabolical of the "exterminating angel.""

"What does he say? He starts with the following observation: Bernard Arnault initially controls LVMH through a cascade of companies. If they were all merged, his final stake would be reduced to 3.6%. "Following various sales and acquisitions of companies, the stakes will change significantly and allow Mr. Bernard Arnault to increase his interest percentage from around 3% in 1988 to 19% in 1998," writes Antoine Gaudino: thus [...] the value of Mr. Bernard Arnault's stake in LVMH has considerably increased over the past ten years, as it has gone from 1.5 to 22 billion francs.""