8 Book Review June 2017 V I D E O A G E By Yuri Serafini* Vincent Bolloré: The New King of The European Media, by Italian financial reporter Fiorina Capozzi (96 pages, jointly published by goWare and kay4biz) is an ambitious book recounting the ascent of Vincent Bolloré, a 65-year-old native of Brittany in northwest France who turned his family paper business into a diversified global conglomerate with close ties to the French government. The book is a timely exposé of the principal achievements of one of the key players of continental European business, however it falls short of the mark far too often. Although he gained a reputation in France as a corporate raider, today Bolloré’s eponymous holding company extracts about half of its turnover from shipping to and from Africa. Particular attention is given to Bolloré’s corporate mantra, which intermingled expansionary diversification while safeguarding family control over the group that carries his name. The author points out an interesting trend, exposing the outside support, which Vincent relied on at multiple points in his career; not only did he count on outside financiers supporting his many acquisitions, but oftentimes he relied on purchasing a minority stake in companies where he could count on the collaboration of existing board members to cooperate with him, allowing him to control entire companies while holding between 20 percent and 30 percent of shares. The book also recounts how Bolloré’s aggressiveness and opportunism did more than once sour a negotiation: a difficult relationship with the executive board of the oil conglomerate Elf leading to heated discussions over a company jointly owned with Bolloré, which went as far as involving Jacques Chirac’s Minister of Industry, Alain Madelin. Madelin isn’t the only politician who appears in Capozzi’s book. Bolloré is also close friends with the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Bolloré holding company is often represented as a vaguelymercantilist representative of French interests abroad. A peculiar incident when the president of the Ivory Coast stopped him from purchasing a tobacco company is painfully unexplored; we only know Bolloré was somehow stopped from leaving his hotel room for three days, however we are not told the intricacies of the deal which led to the businessman being almost held hostage. Half the book is dedicated to Bolloré’s investments in Italy. His first sally was in the capital of an investment bank, Mediobanca, and an insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali, in the early 2000s. In both groups, he was welcomed as a neutralizing agent amidst infighting between existing shareholders. However, in the decade that followed he slowly earned the animosity of some board members for his aggressive accumulation of stock and influence over the executive suite. Bolloré has since, through Vivendi — a corporation controlled by his holding company — purchased a 24-percent share in Italy’s largest cell phone carrier, Telecom Italia, and also purchased a 30-percent stake inMediaset Group’s entire subscription platform, called Mediaset Premium, after a lengthy negotiation with its owners, the Berlusconi family. In February of this year, the Milan district attorney’s office opened an investigation involving a number of Vivendi executives and shareholders; Vivendi released a statement accusing the Berlusconi family of having pressed unfounded charges as a response to a rapid acquisition of shares by the French group. Thus, given these ongoing, not entirely cordial, negotiations between the two entertainment groups, a background on the key players is timely. A little too timely, it seems. The book feels very rushed. The publisher, goWare, certainly can’t have helped; goWare is a digital publishing startup whose inexperience is all too evident. The book is available on Amazon in three languages: Italian, French and English at $11.99 for each print on demand version and on goWare at 4.99 euro for each digital version. To top it all off, the translator, Stephanie Lamalle, and the “revisor” Katherine Perunic make a number of serious translation errors. The most repeated is the use of the word “titles” instead of stock. However, the translator doesn’t seem to have a clear grasp of financial jargon across the board: the phrase, “Listed on the Stock Exchange” is erroneously rendered as “Quoted on the Stock Exchange,” a direct translation of the author’s original phrase in her native Italian, Quotato in Borsa(although it would seem that the book was originally written in French, in which case, the original phrase would have probably beenCoté en Bourse). The translation renders some sentences entirely unreadable, for example, a footnote on page 22 reads as follows: “He is the son of Serge Dassault. Serge’s family is the defense French giant, Dassault, listened in the Paris stock market. Several tile the name of his brother, Laurent, appeared as a Mediobanca potential new investor.” Google Translate would have at least avoided the spelling errors. Verb tenses are also often in disagreement. Also working against the book’s readability is the author’s tendency to draw esoteric connections between French and Italian investors and entrepreneurs, which the footnotes only partially clarify. Key players, like the Italian industry association CONSOB (the public authority responsible for regulating the Italian financial markets), are introduced with little or no explanation as to what their powers are and how they impact a given share sale or purchase. Given the book’s length, its insistence on being laconic is somewhat confounding; it’s fair to say readers picking up books on businessmen would be more than interested in the backstory involved. Further, Capozzi as an author is fond of using euphemistic language, especially when talking about Italian entrepreneurs, which she regularly covers in the Italian Il Fatto Quoditiano daily newspaper. However, it is unclear howmany foreign readers will understand that Il Biscione (The Big Serpent) is shorthand for Berlusconi’s media empire (it is used as a logo in Berlusconi’s holding company, Fininvest). The cover is particularly emblematic; it depicts Bolloré and the former Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, talking on the phone (presumably with each other), and in the background Mediaset’s antenna tower is visible. It indicates that, like most other Italian cases, the solution to the Bolloré-Berlusconi spat will be political, since Renzi still controls the Italian government (he’s General Secretary of the ruling party) and the government has legislative power over Telecom Italia, of which Bolloré owns 24.68 percent. In fact, the book recounts multiple meetings between Bolloré and then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in the summer of 2015. The Renzi government had been giving mixed signals with regards to the willingness to expand the national fiber-optic network in the event of a foreign takeover of Telecom Italia; the expansion was only approved after themeeting.What assurances Bolloré gave Renzi are unclear, but they probably involve Telecom Italia keepings jobs in Italy. According to the book’s author, some commentators foresee a sort of three-way agreement involving Vivendi, Mediaset and Telecom Italia which will shape media and communications for the Italian companies and their partners and subsidiaries in the Mediterranean for years to come. The only thing that is certain is that Bolloré’s negotiating position, so far, is very strong. Halfway through the book a timeline of “Bolloré’s stock market raids and transactions” appears, however not one Italian transaction is listed. In all, Capozzi’s book is timely and ambitious. However, it is rushed to the point of being, at times, unreadable. *Yuri Serafini is an economist from Bocconi University in Milan, currently earning a Master’s Degree at Johns Hopkins University. A Complex, Fascinating Franco-Italian Spat For Media Control, Poorly Rendered
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