Albert Frère

Who is Albert Frère?

Albert, Baron Frère is a Belgian businessman and the richest man in Belgium.

Frère grew up as a son of a nail merchant and helped in the business since an early age. His father died when Frère was 17; Frère had to leave school and run the family business by himself. At the age of 30, he started investing in Belgian steel factories and by the end of the 1970s he practically controlled the whole steel industry in the region of Charleroi. He foresaw the coming steel crisis of the late 1970s and sold his enterprises to the Belgian state after merging them with the competing steel firm Cockerill to create Cockerill-Sambre.

Frère used the proceeds from this sale to build an investment empire around the Swiss holding company Pargesa which he founded with the Canadian investor Paul Desmarais. Pargesa took over the Belgian holding company Groupe Bruxelles Lambert in 1982 and over the year added significant stakes in such wide ranging Belgian companies as Petrofina, Royale Belge Insurance, Compagnie Luxembourgoise de Télédiffusion, and Tractebel.