- Hermès descendant Nicolas Puech planned to leave billions to his former gardener.
- Now he says his fortune is gone, alleging fraud by his former wealth manager.
Nicolas Puech, a descendant of Hermès founder Thierry Hermès — who made headlines last year after he reportedly planned to leave half his fortune to his former gardener — is now claiming his billions have disappeared.
The 81-year-old alleged in court filings he no longer owns 6 million shares of Hermès worth about $13 billion and that his former wealth manager of more than two decades, Eric Freymond, played a part in the loss, according to a report in Swiss investigative news outlet Gotham City.
But a Swiss court threw out Puech's allegations earlier this month, writing that the alleged fraud was "undetectable to common mortals," according to Bloomberg.
Swiss news outlet the Tribune de Genève reported that the stock was deposited in a Geneva bank in 2012, but that it's now unclear where the shares are.
Geneva's Public Prosecutor's Office had declined to investigate based on Peuch's allegations. The court's decision on July 24 backed up the prosecutors' decision.
Peuch's lawyers, Grégoire Mangeat and Fanny Margairaz, told Business Insider in a statement that they were "in the process of studying the criminal file in detail" and declined to comment further.
Lawyers for Freymond did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
Puech, who is 81 and has no children, previously owned 5.7% of Hermès as its largest individual shareholder, the Tribune de Genève reported last year.
Hermès was founded in 1837 as a horse saddle maker, and the brand has since evolved into the ultimate status symbol — and a rare outlier in a slumping luxury market in China, where it recently reported steady sales.
Before Peuch decided to adopt his former employee and bequeath him his multibillion-dollar fortune, he had planned to leave his inheritance to the Isocrates Foundation, according to Bloomberg — a nonprofit he founded dedicated to public-interest journalism.
Bloomberg reports that the future of the Foundation is now in question. In November 2023, it said it would no longer accept new funding requests.