Documents Show LVMH Signed 2002 Pact for Hermès Heir Shares

Pierre Godé signed the agreement alongside Eric Freymond on November 12, 2002. Godé was the longtime adviser to LVMH’s chairman, Bernard Arnault. Freymond managed the wealth of Nicolas Puech, an heir from one of the three family branches that still controlled Hermès. The pact they executed that day covered the purchase of millions of Hermès International shares from Puech and from other heirs in that same branch.

The timing ran to a succession already expected inside Hermès. The transactions were to begin after the departure of Jean-Louis Dumas, the leader who had run the house since 1978 and who would step down in 2006. Hermès itself dated to 1837, when Thierry Hermès opened a saddlery and harness workshop in Paris; control had remained with his descendants, the Dumas, Guerrand and Puech cousins. LVMH, formed in 1987 by the merger of Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy and expanded under Arnault into a holding company of some seventy-five luxury brands, was already building a position in the smaller firm. The signed pages fixed the heir’s shares inside that plan.

In a June 2026 filing before a Paris court, LVMH answered the civil suit Nicolas Puech had brought in France the year before. The filing responded to claims that the heir’s Hermès stake had been taken through schemes involving his wealth manager. Bernard Arnault was named among the defendants with the group, along with companies affiliated with Eric Freymond. “The group never contemplated acquiring Nicolas Puech's stake, let alone against his will,” LVMH stated. The company argued that buying the holding would have made no sense. According to the filing, LVMH had planned at the time to take the opposite strategy of convincing Puech to join a shareholder bloc that could influence Hermès, which the heir could not do without his stake. The group acknowledged working with Freymond to accumulate Hermès shares. Any purchase of stock belonging to Puech, it said, would have been unintentional.

Documents reviewed by Reuters and reported in September 2026 first publicized the 2002 signed pact against that denial. An LVMH spokesman declined to comment on the agreement.

In May, Swiss lawyer Alexandre Montavon testified before French prosecutors about his work on the 2002 agreement. A transcript of that session, later reviewed by Reuters, recorded that he had advised LVMH on the pact while serving at the same time as a board member of Freymond’s wealth-management firm, a dual role that placed him on both sides of the arrangement.

Montavon described the structure Freymond had proposed. The share purchases would be routed through Puech’s accounts and financed by LVMH, so that the conglomerate’s identity as the ultimate buyer stayed concealed from Hermès family holders who might otherwise have refused to sell to a competitor. “Mr. Freymond suggested to us to make these transactions through Mr. Puech, financed by LVMH, and that's what was done,” Montavon said.

Between 2001 and 2009, as Freymond helped LVMH assemble its Hermès position, LVMH and the Arnault family holding company paid his firm at least $20 million in commissions and fees.

The position took shape over years of purchases kept from public view. In October 2010 LVMH disclosed a 17 percent stake in Hermès, surprising investors who had not seen the scale while it was still being built. Hermès called the move a hostile takeover attempt. The holding climbed as high as 23 percent before a 2014 settlement ended the open contest: LVMH distributed the Hermès shares to its own shareholders, and the corporate fight closed.

LVMH says the 2002 agreement was destroyed in late 2010. In a 2017 Swiss court filing the group stated that the agreement had never been executed and that it could not verify whether Puech had authorized Freymond to sell the stock. LVMH has never said whether it purchased Hermès shares owned by Puech.

In 2013 the Autorité des Marchés Financiers fined LVMH €8 million for disclosure failures tied to the preparation of the stake-building operation and to its 2008 and 2009 financial statements. The path of individual family holdings inside the larger position would not come into full dispute until much later.

In 2022, after ending his ties with Freymond, Nicolas Puech discovered that his Hermès shares were gone. The stake had been roughly 6 percent of the company. At current prices it was estimated at about $10 billion, or €10 billion.

He filed a civil lawsuit in Paris in 2025 seeking €14 billion ($16 billion) in damages. The defendants named were LVMH, Bernard Arnault, and companies affiliated with Freymond. A parallel French criminal investigation examined the alleged misappropriation of those shares for LVMH’s benefit. Through counsel, Alexandre Montavon denied any wrongdoing. No charges had been filed against him in the probe. Puech declined to comment, citing the criminal investigation.

What had become of the six percent, and any money paid for it, remained unresolved while both cases continued.

In 2016 Eric Freymond filed a compensation lawsuit against LVMH in Switzerland. He alleged that the group had not fairly paid him for the services he had given in helping it acquire Hermès stock. LVMH settled the case in 2019, agreeing to pay Freymond €10 million. The company’s filing in that dispute set out the earlier stream of commissions and fees and said those sums were intended to maintain its relationship with him and to prevent him from facilitating transfers of Hermès shares to other competitors. According to the same filing, Freymond’s access to the stock rested on his relationship with Nicolas Puech and on connections to other relatives who owned Hermès shares.

After Freymond’s death, Hermès chief executive Axel Dumas, a founding-family heir, told reporters what he had long believed about the missing holding. “Nicolas Puech doesn't have his shares anymore,” Dumas said. “I'm waiting for the outcome of the criminal investigation, but I do not believe these shares can be recovered.”

Freymond died in July 2025 after being struck by a train in Switzerland, while French prosecutors were investigating whether he had misappropriated Puech’s shares. Prosecutors in Bern examined the death and ruled it a suicide. Before he died, Freymond had denied any wrongdoing.