The hedge fund executive who committed suicide in his 22nd-floor office on Madison Avenue office was a blue-blood French aristocrat and champion yachtsman entrusted with the money of some of Europe’s wealthiest families.
Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, 65, had apparently spent a frantic week trying to recover more than a billion dollars he had invested with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. Distraught over his inability to do so, he locked himself in his office Monday evening after telling a cleaning crew he was working late.
New York City Police Spokesman Paul Browne said that a security guard called to unlock the office discovered him at his desk early Tuesday with both wrists slashed. A bottle of sleeping pills and a box cutter were nearby.
No suicide note was found. But if de la Villehuchet’s death is ultimately tied to the collapse of the $50-billion Ponzi scheme allegedly perpetrated by Madoff, it will serve as grim testimony to the personal devastation wrought by the fraud.
De la Villehuchet (pronounced veel-ou-SHAY) is a descendant of an aristocratic French family which still owns a 17th-century chateau in Plouer-sur-Rance in Brittany, and whose name is memorialized in the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, built by Napoleon.
He traded on those connections when he co-founded Access International Advisers in the mid-1990s with Patrick Littaye, a French banker.
The company relied on a network known as “Alpine advisers” - among them, Philippe Junot, the former husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco, and Prince Michel of Yugoslavia - who moved among the ski slopes, casinos and yacht clubs of European high society to woo clients, according to the New York Daily News.
Those clients included Liliane Bettencourt, the L’Oreal heiress and the world’s wealthiest woman, according to Bloomberg News. Members of the Rothschild family were also said to be investors.
The company wrote to clients Dec. 12 that several funds, including its LUXALPHA SICAV-American Selection, were invested solely with Madoff’s firm. That fund had $1.4 billion in assets as of Nov. 17, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
De la Villehuchet, also a former chairman and chief executive of Credit Lyonnais Securities USA, lived with his wife, Claudine, in Westchester County. He was an avid sailor who had won the Shields Class national yacht championship four years in a row, and was a member of the New York Yacht club.
Guy Gurney, a British photographer, told the Associated Press that he and de la Villehuchet became friends sailing together.
“He was a very honorable man,” Gurney said. “He was extraordinarily generous. He was an aristocrat, but not a snob. He was a real person. When he was sailing, he was one of the boys.”
The two were supposed to have dinner last Friday, but Gurney called the day before to cancel because of the weather. “He said, ‘I can’t talk now. I’m involved with Madoff, and I just can’t talk,” Gurney recalled. “He wasn’t his usual self. He didn’t sound normal.”
It is not known what scrutiny de la Villehuchet may have been facing over those losses.
The Wall Street Journal reported that while at Credit Lyonnais, de la Villehuchet played a key role in the formation of Apollo Management LP, the private equity firm run by Leon Black, a former Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banker.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
2 Comments
#1. Steve 12.24.2008
This is why the goverment needs to take charge of Stock Market! Their should be an insurance policy like The FDIC to protect against FRAUD not loses.
#2. Joe 02.18.2009
If the government is in charge, that does not mean that the stock market won’t have any problems. Besides, who works for the government? the everyday people… or Elite families, such as the Bushes, Rothschild family, Rockefellers, Duponts, Kennedy family, Van Duyn’s, Krupp, McDonald, Windsors, Onassis, Li Family and god knows who else… Don’t forget, these people are in power… so having the government being in charge of stuff, actually… won’t be a good thing either…
Sarcasm: I am a elitist, my family has been around for 300 years and we own big corporations and have billions in funding…. and now I have power to control whatever I want… buy, sell, force whatever competitors I want out of business… very brilliant idea….
Leave a Comment