Devouring Hermès (Part 1)

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. Today we're talking about Devouring Hermès: the vanished fortune of an heir, and a war over the empire of luxury.

Part One: Old Pi's Vanished Fortune

The story begins with a truly absurd question.

If you had €10 billion, would you check your account every day?

A normal person might check more than once. They'd want to look before bed and again after waking up.

But one heir of the Hermès family took this to the other extreme. He owned six million Hermès shares, worth about €10 billion, and those shares vanished from his world for more than a decade. He didn't realize it until very late.

His name is Nicolas Puech.

His name is too long, so from here on we'll call him Old Pi.

Old Pi is not an ordinary tycoon. He is one of the fifth-generation heirs of the Hermès family. The family started out making saddles, then moved into leather goods and silk scarves and handbags, growing step by step from a French handcraft workshop into one of the toughest luxury brands in the world.

So when Old Pi was born, the ticket he held was not an ordinary entry pass. It was a ticket that practically said "top European family assets" on it.

He worked at Hermès when he was young, and even served as an executive.

But he left soon afterward.

He didn't seem to be the kind of person who had to sit on the board and control everything. Later, he ran his own fashion company, worked as a water-skiing instructor, and then, eventually, moved to Switzerland and lived a country-gentleman life in the European countryside, living off dividends from his Hermès shares.

Picture this.

The Alps. A manor house. An old villa. Far from the family's headquarters in Paris, far from the family council meetings, far from the daily clashes of the luxury industry.

For most people, this would be the end of the story.

But for Old Pi, this was exactly where the disaster began.

Because he simply didn't pay attention to money.

He handed almost everything related to his assets over to one person.

Éric Freymond.

From here on we'll call him Old Fu.

Old Fu was a figure in Geneva's financial circles. Through marriage he had entered a prominent local family, and through connections at a private bank he met Old Pi. The two had known each other for many years, and the relationship ran deep. How deep?

In Old Pi's eyes, Old Fu was not an ordinary financial adviser.

He was a friend, a steward, a secretariat. He was the person who handled the outside world for Old Pi.

Old Fu opened his letters, answered his calls, signed his checks, and even taught him how to communicate with the Hermès family.

Pay attention here. This is the first warning sign.

A billionaire had outsourced almost his entire wealth system to a single person.

It's like a company handing over its finance permissions, contract permissions, email permissions and board communications all to one outside consultant.

If the consultant is reliable, that's convenience.

If the consultant isn't, that's like handing your safe key to a locksmith.

What made Old Fu truly powerful was that he didn't just manage the money. He controlled the gateways.

He held the gateway between Old Pi and the bank.

He held the gateway between Old Pi and the lawyers.

He held the gateway between Old Pi and the Hermès family.

Slowly, Old Pi's financial world was enclosed behind thick glass. Outsiders couldn't see inside, and those inside could only look out through one window: Old Fu.

Then two critical moves took place.

The first was blank signatures.

Old Pi would sign blank documents in advance. Old Fu could then fill in the numbers, the text, and the transaction details, and act in Old Pi's name.

Everyone, this is no longer ordinary authorization.

It's more like handing a stack of blank contracts with the company seal already stamped on them to someone, and trusting that they'll only use them to pay the property management fee.

The second was bearer shares.

Old Fu persuaded Old Pi to change registered shares, which were relatively easy to track, into bearer shares.

Registered shares are like a property certificate with your name written on it. Whoever holds them, whoever transfers them, and when changes happen are fairly easy to check.

Bearer shares are like a safe-deposit key with no name written on it. Whoever holds it has very wide freedom to dispose of what's inside.

You could argue that in a place like Switzerland, where many wealthy people live, bearer shares offer privacy and tax conveniences.

But they also carry a fatal problem.

Once shares become bearer shares, the flow of assets is like walking from daylight into thick fog. If you want to trace where they've gone, the difficulty rises sharply.

So at this point, the conditions for the crime were basically in place.

Old Pi trusted Old Fu completely.

Old Fu held a large number of powers of attorney.

The shares had become harder to trace.

And Old Pi himself rarely looked closely at the accounts.

This was not ordinary carelessness.

This was a vacuum of control.

On paper, the wealth belonged to you. In practice, the wealth had already begun to stop listening to you.

What finally woke Old Pi up was not a bank, not a lawyer, and not Hermès headquarters.

It was the gardener's wife.

During the pandemic, Old Pi had grown very close to the family of the Moroccan gardener on his estate. He treated the gardener, the gardener's wife, and their children as family.

He even planned to leave a large share of his fortune to the gardener's family.

That alone already sounds like a glamorous film about the aristocracy.

An heir to one of Europe's top luxury families, far away from his original family system, growing ever closer to the gardener's family on his estate, and even wanting to change his inheritance arrangements.

But the real explosion didn't come from his will. It came from a bank transfer.

At the end of 2022, Old Pi asked Old Fu: "The one million Swiss francs I asked you to transfer to the gardener's family, how did that go?"

Old Fu hesitated.

After Old Fu left, the gardener's wife told Old Pi: "We never received that money."

Everyone, many big cases are not broken by a brilliant detective. They are broken by the simplest question.

Where's the money?

Only then did Old Pi begin to feel that something was wrong.

He hired lawyers, hired consulting firms, and began a full check of his financial situation.

When the results came in, he was stunned.

The accounts were already empty.

Ninety percent of the Hermès shares had been sold back in 2008.

In other words, while Old Pi still believed he was the largest individual shareholder in Hermès, his wealth base may have been hollowed out years earlier.

It's like someone living in a mansion, looking at the crystal chandeliers, oil paintings and fireplace every day, and believing the house still belongs to them.

But in fact, the property deed was transferred away many years earlier.

In a fit of rage, Old Pi fired Old Fu and sued him in Geneva, accusing him of using decades of friendship to secretly sell a huge amount of Hermès shares behind Old Pi's back.

But at first, the Geneva court did not take Old Pi's side.

The court's logic was cold.

You were extremely indifferent to your own financial situation. In front of Old Fu, you almost completely gave up control. And now the evidence isn't clear enough, so it's hard for the court to step in.

That sounds like legal language. Translated into plain words, it means this:

Your money is gone, and you may have been deceived.

But you were deceived to this extent because you yourself opened the door.

Old Pi didn't give up.

Over the following years, he continued to bring civil and criminal lawsuits in France. At first Old Fu repeatedly denied it, saying he had never touched Old Pi's shares.

But later in the investigation, Old Fu finally admitted that those shares had been sold more than a decade earlier.

Only, he said Old Pi had known about it.

Old Pi, of course, refused to accept that.

The judges didn't fully believe Old Fu either, because Old Pi produced documents showing that Old Fu had repeatedly assured him his wealth was intact.

So Old Fu was provisionally charged with forgery, use of forged documents, and aggravated abuse of trust.

His bank accounts were frozen.

His art was frozen.

Sculptures and furniture were frozen too.

Then the story suddenly turned into a black-and-white thriller.

In July 2025, shortly after being questioned by judicial authorities, Old Fu was struck by a train near a holiday chalet in the Swiss Alps and died.

The police ruled it a suicide.

The key person was gone.

But he took with him not only his own life, but also many details of this unsolved fortune case that may never be explained.

So where did Old Pi's shares actually go?

If only Old Fu had pocketed the money on his own, the story would already be strange enough.

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