From the Wall Street Journal, August 8:
On the morning of July 23, Eric Freymond stepped out of his chalet in the hills above Saanen, a discreet alpine village near Gstaad. The Swiss sky was overcast, the air cool.
A financial adviser to Europe’s elite for decades, Freymond was under mounting pressure. He was accused of playing a role in the mysterious disappearance of a massive fortune belonging to an Hermès heir, and earlier in the month he sat for lengthy interviews with French authorities investigating the matter. Other clients had also accused him of improprieties. He had denied any wrongdoing.
The 67-year-old rode his bike past wooden houses with triangular roofs, heading toward the center of town. Near a campsite by the railway, he left the path and approached the tracks. Shortly thereafter, he was struck by a train and killed.
Local police are treating the death as a suicide.
Freymond’s death marks a dramatic turn in one of the most baffling and epic financial sagas of the century: the mystery of the missing Hermès stake, worth $15 billion based on the luxury giant’s current valuation. Freymond had been the longtime wealth manager of Nicolas Puech, a fifth-generation Hermès heir and once the company’s largest individual shareholder. Puech says he discovered around 2022 that six million Hermès shares he believed were held in bank accounts in his name were missing. The proceeds from any sale were also unaccounted for.
Puech, now 82 years old, filed lawsuits against Freymond in both Switzerland and France, accusing him of “massive fraud.”
In recent interviews with French authorities, Freymond for the first time appeared to confirm the longtime suspicion of people close to Hermès: A large chunk of the shares had been sold to the company’s rival, LVMH,
as part of a high-profile buying spree by its chairman and chief executive, the luxury titan Bernard Arnault, more than a decade ago. Freymond’s contention was that Puech himself was part of the plan.
After his death, two of Freymond’s lawyers, François Zimeray and Jessica Finelle, described their client in a statement as “a man of rare sensitivity, broken by the violence of suspicion, betrayal and a world without mercy. What some mistook for weakness was, in fact, a reflection of his humanity.”
Puech, for his part, offered his condolences to Freymond’s family despite what he called their “public and legal disputes.” In a statement, he described Freymond as a friend and adviser with whom he had worked in total confidence for 25 years—until that relationship, he said, was “broken by events of extreme gravity” related to the missing shares, “on which the full truth still needs to come to light.”
I met with Freymond twice last year while reporting a story for The Wall Street Journal on the missing Hermès shares. The first time was in Geneva, in the lobby of a hotel near the airport, just before he boarded a flight to Italy. The second was at La Réserve, a luxurious five‑star hotel tucked off the Champs‑Élysées in Paris. We sat in the velvet hush of Le Gaspard, the hotel’s bar, and drank coffee.
Freymond was smartly dressed, with neatly combed gray hair, and gave off an air of physical fragility. His eyes moved constantly—scanning the room, never quite at rest.
Unlike Puech, who declined to speak with me last August when I visited the tiny village in the Swiss Alps where he lives, Freymond was eager to make his case. He was forceful in his defense, often combative.
He insisted, as he had for years, that he had never managed the missing shares. He said he didn’t know where they had gone. Puech, he claimed, was hiding them himself, unwilling to hand them over to the foundation he had once pledged them to. Instead, Puech wanted to adopt a one-time employee and leave them to him, an allegation Freymond had previously reported to Switzerland’s child and adult protection authority, but which had been dismissed.
Much had happened in the months since those meetings. In the period leading up to his death in late July, the legal and financial pressure on Freymond was ratcheting up, according to people familiar with the matter and court documents reviewed exclusively by the Journal.
A French investigation, first opened in 2015 after a lawsuit filed by Hermès alleging forgery and the use of forged documents by Freymond, had gained momentum. Other cases were piling up. One came from the family of late French multimillionaire Richard Desurmont, which accused Freymond of misappropriating assets. A hearing in that case was scheduled for late August. Freymond’s chalet in Saanen, near where he died, had recently been placed under a judicial lien, preventing its sale, according to people familiar with the matter.
But Puech’s case was the most significant. In December 2023, Puech filed a criminal complaint in France for breach of trust, accusing Freymond of misappropriating his assets and seeking billions of euros in damages.
In June, one of Freymond’s two daughters got married, a rare bright spot during an otherwise dark stretch. Freymond seemed tired, people close to him said, and was feeling overwhelmed by the numerous lawsuits he was facing.
On July 7, just two weeks before his death, Freymond was in France to answer questions from investigating magistrates in Paris, in connection with cases filed by Hermès and Puech. As a Swiss citizen, he wasn’t strictly obligated to appear—Switzerland doesn’t extradite its own nationals—but he chose to go.
To prepare, Freymond had assembled a heavyweight legal team including Zimeray, a former diplomat, and Jean Tamalet, a combative strategist from the U.S. law firm King & Spalding. Both accompanied him during the questioning.
After three days, the magistrates filed preliminary charges against Freymond for forgery, use of forged documents and aggravated breach of trust. In the French legal system, preliminary charges mark a critical threshold: Magistrates believe there is enough evidence to justify continuing the investigation.
Freymond was required to post several million euros in bail but was given months to gather the funds. He was barred from contacting a number of individuals, including Puech.
In his testimony, which was held in one of the magistrate’s offices, Freymond proved to be far more expansive than he had ever been before. He also appeared to shift his defense from what he had previously said. Details of his conversations with the investigating magistrates were included in the court documents reviewed by the Journal and many haven’t been previously reported.
For years, Freymond maintained that he managed Puech’s assets, except one key category: the Hermès shares Puech had inherited from his mother and, later, his sister. Those shares made up 6% of what is now one of Europe’s biggest companies by market value.
But during questioning, one magistrate confronted Freymond about this claim, stating that he’d had mandates to manage all three accounts in which Puech held those shares. Freymond’s response was that he hadn’t realized he was managing the entirety of Puech’s stake.
“For me, it wasn’t the whole holding, just a part,” he said. “He gave me a mandate over some Hermès stock, but I had no knowledge of his full fortune.”....
....MUCH MORE
We mentioned, in connection with Rybolovlev and his art dealer:
Dirty deeds, not dirt cheap.
It's pretty well established that the punishment for an agent's breach of the duty of loyalty to his principal is death.
At least in Russia at any rate— Big Money: "What Did Sotheby’s Know And When Did They Know It", November 2016
Previously
December 2023 - "Hermès heir wants to leave his fortune to his gardener"
August 2024 - "Luxury Heir Alleges His $13 Billion Hermès Fortune Has Vanished"
Have they checked the couch cushions? People say they sometimes find things behind the couch cushions.April 2025 - "Birkin bags will cost even more as Hermes vows to hike prices in US to counter Trump tariffs"
July 2025 - "Original Birkin bag shatters record with £7m sale"
