Investigation“Successions” (6/6). They are the two most prominent heirs to the empire founded by their father, Francis. In business, Martin and Olivier Bouygues form a formidable duo. They proved it in 2016 when they acquired a Saumur vineyard run by a much less united family.
These banks of the Loire around Saumur, Martin Bouygues do not really know them. In this year 2016, he does not yet frequent the Renaissance villages and the welcoming inns along the river. The irremovable CEO of the communications, telephony and construction group – “I am not the oldest, but I am the oldest president of the CAC 40”, he likes to emphasize – stays much more frequently in Sologne, where he owns a vast estate and a pheasant farm, a few kilometers from the castle bought decades earlier by his father, Francis. This is where he hunts, on fall and winter weekends, with his eldest Olivier and other bosses.
For more than thirty years, the two Bouygues brothers have conducted their business together. Often CEOs look like the industry their business is in, and these are no exception. The construction industry is a harsh world where you have to be clever; communication presupposes warmth and a sense of psychology. Martin, number one in the Bouygues group, combines these two worlds: “He is a cash type, who does not bother with convolutions when it comes to deciding, but he also has a cordial character which seduces”, assures a former Minister of the Economy of Nicolas Sarkozy, this president that Martin Bouygues has long called his ” best friend “.
His brother Olivier, two years older, is less known to the general public. The same ex-minister describes it as follows: “A loud mouth, always telling his four truths to someone who has just been presented to him, a little “poujado” sometimes, but pragmatic like an engineer. ” In this year 2016, he is the deputy managing director of the group, in other words two notches under his younger brother, but does not take any offense.
Hunting and investments
Same comfortable figure, same round face, Martin and Olivier Bouygues are not only physically alike. They also share a strong taste for good food and hunting, as well as dozens of joint investments in orchards, beehives, sturgeon farms for caviar, truffles, and in the heart of the Bordeaux vineyards. This end of winter, it is precisely to buy in their name a new wine property that Martin Bouygues has taken the path of the Loire Valley.
The case requiring tact, Olivier considered it wiser to let go in front of his younger brother. As there is a little fog, that day, the big boss gave up traveling in Augusta A 109, the helicopter he shares with François Pinault, this other billionaire who, in 1998, helped him to prevent Vincent Bolloré’s raid on his group. Go for the TGV! Two hours forty-five, from Montparnasse station to Saumur station, where François Aubry, a fine connoisseur of the region and advisor in the sale of vineyards, awaits him. It was he who informed the Bouygues about the sale of Clos Rougeard, a small estate renowned among insiders, operated since 1664 by eight generations of the same family of winegrowers, the Foucault.
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