Jean-Marie Messier To Start Hedge Fund In New York

by Carla Johnson, Investors Offshore, London

15 October 2002

Jean-Marie Messier, until very recently the Chairman of debt-laden media conglomerate Vivendi, has told Variety magazine that he plans to start a hedge fund in New York. Messier said that after working three times for other people (once for French prime minister Edouard Balladur on privatisation, once for Michel David-Weill at Lazard Freres, and once for Guy Dejouany at Vivendi) he now plans to work for himself.

It's ironic though that Messier has paid much of the blame for the collapse in Vivendi's share price at the door of hedge funds, regarded in France at least as part of an Anglo-Saxon plot to take over cherished European assets at a fraction of their true worth.

The fund, to be run by Messier Partners, will be financed by investors, said Messier, known for years in France as J6M (Jean–Marie Messier, moi-meme, maitre du monde). After his Vivendi debacle he has been demoted to J2M in the French press; but his reputation seems less tarnished in New York, where the small matter of the 34bn euros of debt he left behind at Vivendi doesn't seem so important. And as French newspaper Liberation points out, he was very successful running investment funds at Lazard. The man remains well-connected in New York, with his place on the board of the Whitney Museum and his wife Antoinette's directorship at the New York Phil.

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