A record number of France’s wealthiest people have asked to be left off the country’s equivalent of The Sunday Times Rich List for fear of being targeted by kidnappers, reports The Times.
Challenges, the financial weekly that publishes an annual list of the 500 richest people, said it had received more such requests than ever before this year.
The requests follow a spate of kidnappings of cryptocurrency millionaires over the past 12 months. The abductions are said to have caused alarm not just in the cryptocurrency sector but throughout neighbourhoods that are home to the ultra-rich, notably in Paris.
“I don’t wish to flaunt myself in a context of insecurity,” one of the people who asked to be left off the rich list told Challenges.
Thierry Fabre, the magazine’s editor, said such demands were now frequent amid alarm over the prospect of a return to the 1970s, when industrialists and business leaders were regularly targeted by kidnappers.
Read more of this report from The Times.