All the French intertwining of Msc
What does Gianluigi Aponte's Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) do between France and Africa, aiming at a branch of the Bolloré group. The article by Giuseppe Gagliano
From December 20, at 18:00, the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), created by Gianluigi Aponte, has proposed € 5.7 billion to take over the transport and logistics activities carried out by the Bolloré group in Africa .
Born in Sorrento in 1940, Aponte attended the National Institute of Nautical Techniques, became a sailor for the company created by the Neapolitan entrepreneur Achille Lauro, where he became captain of ferries on the Naples-Capri route. Here he met Rafaela Diamant Pinas, daughter of a Swiss banker, who became his wife a few years later.
After collaborating in Geneva with British Bernie Cornfeld's Investor Overseas Service (IOS) (accused of fraud in 1973), Gianluigi Aponte once bought his first ship in 1969 and thanks to the help of his mother-in-law, Régine Hakim, creates Aponte Shipping Company (ASC) the same year. In 1971 he bought a second ship, the Rafaela, and changed the name of his company, which became MSC. Until 1978 he remained in Brussels. A few years later he will sell his fleet and buy his first container ships which will lay the foundations of his new company, a real family multinational.
In fact, the son, Diego, was appointed president and CEO of the group in 2014, while the daughter, Alexa, becomes its financial director whose husband, Pierfrancesco Vago, becomes executive president of MSC Cruises.
The fortune of the Aponte family was estimated at 10.7 billion dollars in 2020 by Bloomberg .
MSC ranks first globally in terms of transportation capacity (4.23 million twenty-foot equivalent, TEU, compared to 4.22 million). MSC ships carry 21.5 million containers every year.
But the interesting aspect, linked to the Bolloré affair, is the fact that the group manages about forty port terminals around the world, of which – coincidentally – two in West Africa.
MSC achieved annual sales of $ 38 billion in 2020 and employs 70,000 people worldwide. But what are the links between the group and France?
Seventeen of its twenty ships have been built at the Chantiers de l'Atlantique, located in Saint-Nazaire since 2001, contributing 5.3 billion euros to the French economy.
Gianluigi Aponte will be given the Legion of Honor by President Nicolas Sarkory in April 2010. Like all multinationals, the head office is located in Geneva while most of the two branches are located in tax havens such as Luxembourg and Cyprus.
But there is an intimate bond, so to speak, between the Italian-Swiss multinational and France: Alexis Kohler, general secretary of the Elysée, is the son of Rafaela Aponte's first cousin. In addition, Kohler was since 2010 the representative of the state on the board of directors of the Saint-Nazaire shipyard, of which MSC was the main customer. Finally, a note of custom: Sophia Loren is considered the official godmother of the MSC fleet.
On the other hand, she is a close friend of the Aponte family.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/msc-francia/ on Fri, 24 Dec 2021 06:59:06 +0000.