Jean-Marie Messier |
Jean-Marie Messier (born December 13, 1957) is a France businessman known for his flamboyance. He gained worldwide notoriety for his fast ascent and fall from power.
Jean-Marie Messier was born in Grenoble.
=Education=
=Career=
With a reputation for deft management and fast thinking, Messier rapidly advanced in the ranks of French government and the corporate world. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he transformed Vivendi from a French utility company into a global media and communications conglomerate worth $51 billion. However, he became disliked by many French people for his perceived American attitude. He was ridiculed for moving his personal office to New York and living in a company flat on Fifth Avenue at huge expense.
In 2002, however, Vivendi began to run into trouble, for which Messier was blamed. On March 5, 2002, the company announced a loss of $14 billion, the largest in French corporate history, mainly due the hugely inflated prices he had paid for the media businesses he had bought and the subsequent dotcom collapse. A little over a year later, on July 3, 2003, Messier was ousted as boss of Vivendi, whose stock soared on the news. His severance indemnities of $20 million were a subject of a protracted dispute with the company. Messier argues that Vivendi s troubles were not of his making. The next year, on March 6, 2003, the company announced an even larger a record loss of $25 billion.
France s Financial Markets Authority fined Messier €1 million for failing to reveal the true nature of Vivendi s financial situation, but he has announced that he will appeal the fine.
Messier has been married since the early 1970s and has five children.
=Affairs=
In 2005 a New York Daily News front page article reported that during his marriage to Antoinette Messier, Jean-Marie Messier had had, for longer than one year, shortly following his being fired from Vivendi, a series of frequent liasons with fashion publicist and socialite Anthea Liontos, former Fashion and Beauty Editor for Working Mother Magazine and former spokesperson for Estee Lauder. Liontos, a Canadian citizen from Montreal with one son, reportedly lived near Messier s opulent Park Avenue apartment. Reportedly, Messier retained at the time of publication of the article a key to her apartment.
A few years before, also during his marriage, as well as during his tenure as CEO of Universal/Vivendi, Messier had reportedly had a long-term affair with French movie actress Sophie Marceau.
=Other Scandals=
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