Keyword: François Pinault

Kering group chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault. © Reuters

Since 2002, French luxury goods and clothing group Kering, whose brands include Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Stella McCartney and Balenciaga, has avoided paying a total of about 2.5 billion euros in tax payments on earnings, mostly to the detriment of the Italian public purse but also that in France and in Britain, according to confidential documents obtained by Mediapart and analysed together with its media partners in the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) journalistic consortium. Yann Philippin (Mediapart), Vittorio Malagutti (L'Espresso) et Esther Rosenberg (NRC Handelsblad) report.

A curious bidding war between some of France's richest men over the ownership of loss-making daily newspapers in the south of France is nothing more than a preliminary move in a political chess game for power in Marseille, Mediapart has learned. As Laurent Mauduit reports, the cast of characters includes colourful businessman Bernard Tapie, billionaire François Pinault and President François Hollande himself, with various political interests pulling strings behind the scenes, in a tale of shifting alliances, old friendships and enmities.