“His face was totally unknown to the group’s collaborators.” A short sentence that probably says a lot about Jean-Charle Naouri, the head of the Casino group in police custody this Thursday for stock manipulation.
It was Philippe Terrien, former executive director of the agri-food branch of the Casino group between 2015 and 2020, who a few days ago portrayed his former boss on the antenna of R.F.I..
“He was an extremely charismatic character, recalls the former executive who met him when he arrived at the distributor in 1992. But I felt a great distance between Jean-Charles Naouri and the problems on the ground. I laughed internally when I was at Casino, I told the enarques I worked with: “It’s still crazy. You believe more in the Excel table that your collaborators have made than in what you see, there is a kind of total disconnection.
Proof of this is that during the five years in charge of Casino’s agri-food branch, he will never meet its general manager. A bit as if Tom Cook, the CEO of Apple, never saw the head of the iPhone division…
But Jean-Charles Naouri is not a shopkeeper. Raised by an isolated mother passionate about music and qualified in English, this native of Annaba in Algeria (1949) is a pure product of French meritocracy. Arriving in France at the age of five, the young Naouri was first in all classes and left for Paris in the mid-1960s to enter a preparatory school in Louis-le-Grand.
First to Normal-Sup
Brilliant mathematician first received in the Normale-Sup Ulm scientific section in 1967, student at the ENA from 1974 to 1976 where he came out in the “boot” (the first 15 of the class), he entered the Finance Inspection then in the direction of Treasury in 1980.
He then began a career in politics when he met Pierre Bérégovoy, to whom he became chief of staff for four years from the Ministry of Social Affairs to the Ministry of the Economy. It was under the impulse of his chief of staff that the socialist, recently reconverted to the market economy, liberalized finance in the Anglo-Saxon style (derivatives with the creations of Matif and Monep, very short-term investments with certificates of deposit or Treasury bonds , the famous OATs, etc.).
The liberal Naouri is the architect of modern French finance that a few years later will make him king. Because during his time at Bercy, he blackens his address book which will be very useful for the following years. He left the civil service in 1986 and joined Rothschild & Cie Banque as managing partner (the first not to belong to the Rothschild family). This will be the launch pad for his career as businessman.
In 1988 he created the Euris investment fund, which took minority stakes in industrial companies and rapidly increased its intervention capacity. Thus it fell -by chance- in mass distribution. In 1991 he bought the Breton distributor Rallye thanks to which he became the first shareholder of the Casino group a year later.
A majority stake that will be the hallmark of the financial Naouri. He comes like a white knight to a struggling group, he takes a minority share of his own funds with options to take control later. And she stacks up structures and plays with the leverage effect of the debt of the companies she controls to finance her acquisitions.
For decades, the formula worked wonders: Franprix-Leader Price, Spar, Vival, Monoprix, Naturalia, Cdiscount or the Brazilian group Pão de Açúca… The distribution groups fell into the hands of the strongest in mathematics one year.
The casino is not Goldman Sachs
The problem is that Casino is not Goldman Sachs. The heart of the reactor of the group that finances this cathedral of financial institutions continues to be the sale of cans of peas, cooked ham and paper towels… What in the jargon of large distribution is called “tile”, that is to say the concrete concerns that relate to customers.
Subjects that do not seem to fascinate Jean-Charles Naouri, who over time retreats more and more to the Aventine of finance instead of pursuing bold trade policies. Result: stores are aging, prices are never at the right pace, change of direction was taken too late, synergies with CDiscount too late and unconvincing.
Result: The casino is gradually losing customers, its price image continues to deteriorate, the cash flow generated melts year after year in a context where the price war between distributors is always compressing the margins a little more.
Naouri’s strategy is in the dark. To finance the expansion, the group is increasingly turning to debt, which today reaches a maximum of 6.4 billion euros.
The predator then becomes the prey. Jean-Charles Naouri’s group is a regular target of analysts whose ratings are sinking its share price. As in 2015 with the firm Muddy Waters. This puts you at the mercy of predators and speculators.
Which seems to feed some paranoia in the big boss. Many analysts revealed to Capital in 2019 that they had received suspicious phone calls from so-called journalists (Wall Street Journal or BFM Business, etc.) about Casino. An attempt to influence them to support a late share price?
It is also a similar case that took the kingpin into custody on Thursday. The stock market police and the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) suspect collusion between the Casino kingpin and the businessman and press editor Nicolás Miguet to defend the distributor’s stock price between 2018 and 2019. A case for which several searches have already been carried out it has been done.
Source: BFM TV
