Baron Edouard-jean Empain
Privileged Belgian industrialist who endured a grisly kidnapping with a sensational dénouement
BARON EDOUARD-JEAN EMPAIN, the Belgian industrialist who has died aged 80, was the thirdgeneration head of one of Europe’s most powerful business empires – until his life’s gilded course was derailed by violent kidnappers.
Empain was the grandson of Edouard Empain (1852-1929), an engineer who built narrow-gauge railways in Belgium and electric tramways in cities from Brussels to Cairo, before winning a contract in 1897 to deliver the Paris Metro, with 118 stations and 65 kilometres (40 miles) of track, in time for the city’s World Fair in 1900.
Having achieved that feat he embarked, at the command of King Leopold II, on the construction of a railway network to support Leopold’s exploitation of what was then the Congo Free State. Empain’s reward, in 1907, was a barony – and his final great project was the development of Heliopolis, an opulent garden city, complete with racecourse, aerodrome and grand basilica, that is now an exclusive suburb of Cairo.
Edouard-jean Empain, known to intimates as “Wado”, took command of the family firm in 1969 and outmanoeuvred political opposition to complete a merger with the French engineering conglomerate Schnieder. Over the following decade, Empainschnieder subsidiaries played a major role in the nuclear power programme promoted by President Giscard d’estaing, whom Empain counted as a friend.
The group grew to encompass 300 companies, with 120,000 employees – and Baron Empain himself, as he entered his forties, was a force among Europe’s business elite. “Everything I did succeeded,” he once remarked. “I only had to advance and people just lay down in front of me.”
But that all changed at 10.15 on the morning of January 23 1978. The baron’s chauffeured Peugeot was en route from his Avenue Foch apartment to his office at Rue D’anjou, a couple of miles away, when a motorcycle swerved into its path; armed men leapt from two Renault vans, attacked the chauffeur, seized control of the car – and Empain was not seen again until the evening of March 26, 63 days later.
The kidnap gang’s first action (having drawn straws for the task) was to hack off the top joint of Empain’s left little finger with a kitchen knife and deposit it in a locker at the Gare de Lyon. The baron was then kept hooded, chained and hidden under a canvas tent in a villa in the Paris suburb of Savigny-sur-orge, for a month. Though he was later moved to less gruesome conditions, he shed 15 kilos during his captivity.
Meanwhile a ransom rumoured to be equivalent to £10 million had been demanded – and Empain family representatives sought to haggle the sum down. As the police scoured the baron’s life for clues as to who might have a grudge against him, reports emerged that he had been an inveterate womaniser, nightclub habitué and gambler.
His losses at one casino alone, the Palm Beach in Cannes, amounted to more than £1 million in the year before his abduction. As whispers circulated that the episode might even have been staged to enable him to escape unpaid debts, sympathy for Empain began to drain away.
But a member of the gang, Alain Caillol, later offered a political motive, consonant with terrorist kidnappings elsewhere in Europe in that era: Empain had been chosen as a “caricature du capitaliste sauvage”,
after reports of large-scale redundancies in his businesses, from a shortlist that included the aircraft maker Marcel Dassault and the cosmetics heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
Caillol (who himself came from a respectable family in the furniture business) also claimed Empain’s comportment in captivity had won the gang’s respect, in a form of “reverse Stockholm syndrome”.
Detectives disguised as Empain employees eventually staged two “ransom drops”, deploying sacks of newspaper in place of banknotes. The first, at a hotel in the Alps, came to nothing when no one showed up to receive the loot. The second led to a two-day chase across Paris and a gunfight beside an autoroute, in which one kidnapper, a well-known gangster called Daniel Duchateau, was shot dead.
Caillol was captured; after interrogation, he telephoned the remains of the gang (which included his brother François) and told them to release Empain, because the ransom would never be paid and the alternative – kidnapping being a capital crime – was the guillotine. The haggard baron was duly shoved out of a car at Ivry-sur-seine in south-eastern Paris, with a Metro ticket in his pocket.
He travelled into the city, found a public phone near the Opera, and called his wife – whose first words were: “At last, it’s you.” But if he had expected an ecstatic welcome home, he was bitterly disappointed. By his own account only his Labrador, called Love, was genuinely pleased to see him. Embarrassed by the lurid revelations of his affairs, his wife eventually shunned him and their children sided with her.
As for his boardroom colleagues, they were already jockeying for succession. After an interlude in California – “alone with a knapsack”, according to one report – the baron sought to regain control of Empainschnieder, declaring that he had “scores to settle”, but was thwarted. The group passed out of family control in 1981, and the name Empain was expunged.
Edouard-jean Empain was born in Budapest on October 7 1937, the only son of Jean (“Johnny”) Empain by his third wife, Rozell Rowland, an American cabaret dancer who was known as Goldie, having performed in her heyday in nothing but a coating of gold paint; Jean’s earlier marriages had produced three daughters. After Jean died of cancer in 1946, Rozell married his first cousin Edouard-francois Empain, who took over the running of the business and adopted Edouardjean as his own.
Edouard-jean’s childhood was one of privileged solitude. He recalled travelling through the Congo in a private train that would halt, for his comfort, whenever he was served a meal – and observed that the ability, as a 12-year-old, to stop trains whenever he felt inclined had given him an early taste for corporate power.
Family relations were perpetually difficult, however. No sooner had Edouard-jean learnt the rudiments of the business in his twenties than he threatened to sell his majority shareholding to a rival Belgian industrial combine, the Lambert group, unless his stepfather stood aside to enable him to succeed as president of the group.
As to the dénouement of the kidnapping, eight defendants were eventually brought to court – where the severed fingertip was produced, in a flask, as evidence – and received jail sentences of between five and 20 years. In later interviews, the baron seemed more forgiving towards them than he was towards his own entourage and kin, who, he felt, had turned against him.
He also remained angry that offers to pay the ransom from friends such as King Baudouin of Belgium had been scotched by the police.
He returned to business in a modest way, trading in military aircraft components – only to have his Paris office firebombed by anarchists in 1982. His later life, away from the public eye, was divided between Monaco and Paris.
“I have always lived alone,” Empain declared in 2015, “I enjoy my own company.” It was this self-sufficiency, he believed, that had enabled him to endure his horrific ordeal and subsequent personal isolation. He also gave vent to uncompromising Right-wing opinions, including hostility to refugees (“Je suis complètement aux extrêmes”), declaring that if he were French he would have voted for Marine Le Pen.
Edouard-jean Empain married an 18-year-old Italian beauty, Silvana Bettuzzi, in 1957; they were divorced after the kidnapping and in 1990 he married secondly, in Monaco, Jacqueline Ragonaux, who survives him with a son and two daughters of the first marriage.