It’s starting to look like a house of cards that is collapsing… After the ready-to-wear brand Camaïeu, liquidated by the Lille commercial court at the end of September 2022, leaving 2,600 employees on the floor, after Go Sport, Placed in receivership in Grenoble in January 2023, the businessman Michel Ohayon would have asked the commercial court on Friday for the safeguarding of his 26 Galeries Lafayette stores in the provinces – and not their receivership, as has been first stated in error. The court has yet to announce its decision. The idea is to “protect these businesses from any attack”, justifies the boss in an interview with “Sud Ouest”.
On Wednesday, it was the Financière immobilière bordelaise (FIB), its main company, which had been declared insolvent by the Bordeaux commercial court, as revealed by “Liberation”. The administrator and the legal representative appointed for six months will have to decide whether the FIB, reorganized, can continue its activity, or whether it must be sold to other investors. This entity, the true flagship of the group, is at the head of luxury hotels and shopping centers.
Unable to repay the installments of his main creditor, Bank of China, which would have lent him some 200 million euros between 2014 and 2017, Michel Ohayon decided to file for bankruptcy: the revenue generated by the three main assets of the FIB, the Sheraton hotels in Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, the Waldorf Astoria Trianon Palace in Versailles and especially the Grand Hotel in Bordeaux, did not allow him to repay the loans contracted to acquire them on time.
Gap France could be the most weakened
Beyond the FIB itself, this judicial twist could affect other companies in the group. After having made his fortune in real estate and the hotel industry, Michel Ohayon, 104th fortune in France in the summer of 2022 according to the magazine Challenges (with an estate estimated at 1.1 billion euros), has indeed invested in the retail sector, most often by buying companies at the bar of the commercial courts in the worst possible way: Go Sport (sports articles), Gap France and Camaïeu (textiles), Café Legal, not to mention numerous Galeries Lafayette affiliated stores in province, all these companies being attached to Hermione People and Brands (HPB), the distribution arm of the FIB. To this list must be added the Grande Récré, which is not housed in HPB but is a full subsidiary of the FIB.
In recent weeks, almost all of HPB’s businesses have reported significant difficulties, with suppliers, some of whom are unpaid, no longer delivering items to stores – in most cases, at the same time the spokespersons of the FIB had reassuring words. Go Sport, then its parent company, Groupe Go Sport, which employs 2,150 employees, have been in receivership since mid-January.
VIDEO. Final closure of Camaïeu in France: “We are in mourning”, confides an employee
The unions of Gap France (350 employees), but also those of Galeries Lafayette (a few thousand people) exercised their right to alert recently. Won’t the new situation weaken them even more? “The cessation of payments by the FIB shows that it lacks cash, so it will no longer be able to bring fresh money to the subsidiaries that need it”, deciphers an expert, who underlines above all that “to bail out, the FIB will surely have to part with some assets”.
What impact on La Grande Récré?
La Grande Récré (around 1,000 employees) is, for its part, in an atypical situation: “Unlike the other brands bought by the FIB, it remains governed by its historical boss, which protects it”, judges Cédric Ducrocq, the president of Diamart Conseil. Its CEO Jean-Michel Grunberg, who has just celebrated his “45 years in the business”, confirms to us that he is “the only corporate officer at the helm, and, as such, independent of the FIB”, and that “even if the toy market is not always easy”, he notably has “very good relations with (s) suppliers”.
Asked about the possible impact of the FIB’s receivership on all these entities, its spokesperson replies that there will be “no impact on the Grande Récré, an autonomous entity”, and “no impact on HPB , the FIB being only an ultra-minority shareholder”.
In charge of HPB’s communication since the beginning of 2022, the agency Thomas Marko et Associés announced at the end of January that it would cease its missions for HPB: “The abandonment of HPB’s original entrepreneurial project (…), the social context and judicial of the company (…) as well as the amount of our outstanding no longer allow us to carry out the missions for which (we had been selected) at the beginning of 2022”, concludes the agency.