In April 2024, Nicolas decides to sell the 5,862,615 shares in his name, to secure the handover. He sends an email to Yannis Sakkas, Eric Freymond’s lawyer, the one who wrote the report a few months earlier.
Its content, revealed by Challenges13, seems to suggest that Puech had found a buyer for €8bn.
Who is the mystery buyer? Bernard Arnault’s name inevitably hangs in the air, especially as the truce had been signed for 5 years. But the Hermès shareholders’ agreement makes the deal difficult with a family closing ranks against him. Several names from the Middle East have been mentioned.
The problem is that the shares… well, nobody knows where they are.
We’re talking €13 billion.
We’re talking 5% of a luxury giant.
We’re talking a company listed on the CAC 40.
Last June, Nicolas’s lawyer writes to Sakkas, asking Freymond to prove that Nicolas still owns his shares. Since Freymond was the one managing them.
And it is behind Freymond, in fact, that the Hermès family is slowly reconciling. Every member interviewed openly accuses him.
Because today they know it: Freymond was indeed the one who engineered Arnault’s arrival through Nicolas’s shares.
But that doesn’t solve the problem. Neither Hermès, nor the lawyers, nor the agents, nor BNP Paribas, the custodian, can find any mention of Nicolas Puech among individual bearer shareholdings since… 2015.
The mystery remains.