France's billionaire Perrodo family built an $11.4 billion fortune on Africa's abandoned oil wells

In the early 1990s a French engineer sat down with Amoco to discuss an ageing offshore field in Gabon that the American major had written off. The reservoir was tired, the infrastructure was old, and the economics no longer worked for a company of Amoco's size. Hubert Perrodo bought it.

That transaction, unremarkable at the time, established the model that would make his family one of the richest in France. Perenco, the company he founded in 1992, has spent three decades acquiring the fields that BP, Shell, Total and Eni no longer want, running them at lower cost and extracting the barrels the majors left behind. The NGO Sherpa describes it more bluntly as a multinational specialising in the operation of end-of-life oil wells. It now produces roughly 500,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day across 14 countries with about 6,000 employees.

Forbes puts the family fortune at about $11.4 billion, ranking them eighth in France. Bloomberg's index has them lower at $8.7 billion, French estimates have run to €9.5 billion, and Challenges ranked them 15th in the country in 2022. The spread is not sloppiness. The family holds assets through companies registered in Luxembourg, the Bahamas and Guernsey, and the two NGOs suing the group describe it as organised into a myriad of shell companies incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas. Perenco is private and publishes almost nothing.

A fisherman's son who went to Singapore

Hubert Perrodo was born on January 25, 1944, in Larmor-Baden, a village on the Breton coast in Morbihan, into a family of fishermen. He left for Singapore in 1971 and went into oil, working for the drilling contractor Forex and the marine operator Comex, which took him to Iraq, Gabon, Indonesia and back to Singapore.

He started on his own account in 1975, buying boats and launching Cosnav to rent barges to oil companies. He founded the offshore driller Techfor at the start of the 1980s, acquired the French drilling company Cosifor in 1982, and sold Techfor in 1992. The upstream business began in 1985, when the group started buying proven onshore fields in the United States and applying secondary recovery techniques to reservoirs others had abandoned.

Perenco followed in 1992, and Gabon came almost immediately.

He also bought vineyards. In 1989 he acquired Château Labégorce in Margaux, an estate whose history reaches back to 1332, sitting between Château Margaux and Lascombes. In 2006 he added Château Marquis d'Alesme Becker, a third growth in the village itself, and began a full restoration.

He never saw it finished. Perrodo died on December 29, 2006, at 62, in an accident at Courchevel. He was buried in the gardens of Labégorce.

Two countries hold up the structure

Africa is not a division of Perenco's business. It is close to the centre of it.

In Gabon the company holds roughly 270 oil deposits and produces about 100,000 barrels a day, some 40 percent of national output, making it the country's largest producer. It operated through the decades of Bongo family rule and continues under the government that followed. It is now planning an LNG terminal and a gas-fired power station there.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Perenco is the only oil producer in the country, working eleven fields along the coastline at Muanda in Kongo Central and extracting about 20,000 barrels a day. A private French-British company controls an entire nation's petroleum output.

The group also operates in Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon, with further interests in Tunisia and Egypt, and has been financed by banks including BNP Paribas and Standard Chartered.

François Perrodo, born in Singapore in February 1977, chairs the company his father built. He read physics at St Peter's College, Oxford, where he captained the university polo team in 1999, took an engineering degree at the French petroleum institute in 2002 and studied at INSEAD. He races cars and holds an FIA Bronze categorisation. Armel Simondin is chief executive.

French when it pays, foreign when it costs

The model that built the fortune now faces a French court.

Friends of the Earth France and Sherpa sued Perenco S.A. before the Paris judicial tribunal on November 9, 2022, the day Disclose published an investigation with Investigate Europe and the Environmental Investigative Forum documenting 167 pollution incidents linked to the company's DRC operations over 15 years, including inside a protected national park home to manatees and gorillas. The reporting described contaminated drinking water and rising respiratory illness among residents.

The NGOs had spent three years before that trying to obtain, through bailiffs, the documents establishing the legal relationships between the group's entities. They won a final procedural ruling at the Cour de cassation in March 2022 and still could not get them. They filed the substantive case instead.

A case management hearing in October last year confirmed the referral to the tribunal's 34th chamber, which handles corporate liability in social and environmental matters. No hearing date has been set. It is expected in late 2026 or early 2027, and it would be the first case establishing a French company's liability for ecological damage occurring abroad.

Perenco firmly contests all the allegations, which it considers inadmissible and, in any event, ill-founded. Its central argument is jurisdictional: that it cannot be held responsible in France for the conduct of Perenco REP, its Congolese subsidiary.

That subsidiary was for a period headed by Jean-Michel Runacher, father of Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who has served as France's minister for ecological transition. She recused herself from Perenco matters after the connection was reported.

The jurisdictional argument also sits awkwardly against the company's own record. The NGOs point out that Perenco invoked a bilateral treaty between France and Ecuador to win $374 million before an arbitral tribunal, claiming French nationality when it was worth money. Théa Bounfour, who handles the case for Sherpa, called the reverse argument a strategy the company uses systematically to escape environmental responsibility for its foreign operations.

Sandra Cossart, Sherpa's executive director, has described the case as emblematic of the impunity of corporate groups whose activities damage the environment and the rights of communities. The claim rests on France's 2016 biodiversity law, which wrote ecological damage into the civil code.

Conditions at Muanda have not improved while the case has moved. A crude storage facility suffered a major accident in April 2025, and a Congolese parliamentary commission that visited afterwards found undrinkable water, infertile soil, polluted rivers and groundwater, and unfenced flaring zones. Residents told the commission they had experienced skin conditions, diarrhoea and vomiting blood. The report accused Perenco of cleaning the site before inspectors arrived and withholding pollution data gathered by a French subcontractor.

Investigators keep coming back

Running alongside the civil case is a criminal investigation of a different order.

France's National Financial Prosecutor's Office has opened preliminary investigations into alleged bribery of foreign public officials, particularly in African countries where the group operates, conducted by the Central Office for Combating Corruption and Financial and Tax Offences. Two of those investigations concern the Congo arm specifically, one examining suspected fictitious employment and the other suspected corruption in the award of offshore concessions.

Investigators searched Perenco's Paris offices in March 2023. The company said it had cooperated with the authorities from February 2022 and was pleased to do so. Africa Intelligence reported that French investigators conducted fresh searches on June 16 this year, and that the scope of the case has widened.

The Congolese strand concerns the PNGF Sud block off Pointe-Noire, which Total and Eni had abandoned and which Perenco has operated as majority partner since 2016 alongside Petronor E&P, an Oslo-listed company holding its stake through a subsidiary called Hemla. Disclose and Investigate Europe reported that Julienne Sassou-Nguesso, daughter of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, secretly acquired about 15 percent of the entity holding interests in the field through nominees and collected dividends, signing the arrangement on November 11, 2016, days after Hemla executives were invited to meet the president at his home in the Congolese countryside. Her brother-in-law was reported to have helped secure the concession.

On January 26 this year, Norwegian prosecutors charged two businessmen, Knut Søvold and Gerhard Ludvigsen, and the company Hemla Africa Holding with corruption. Økokrim alleged the structure functioned as a bribe delivering at least $24.68 million to the president through close family members up to 2024. The case began when a bank in Monaco flagged a suspicious transaction.

Perenco was not named in the Norwegian indictment. Søvold and Ludvigsen deny wrongdoing, their lawyers saying all agreements were made on commercial terms and had nothing to do with corruption. Petronor said it categorically contests the indictment and welcomes the chance to have the case examined in court.

Spills, and the people who report them

Gabon has produced its own record. On February 16, 2023, a pipeline valve failed at Rembo-Kotto and oil ran into the wetlands around Lake Anengué. A Perenco worker who filmed the damage and spoke anonymously to Investigate Europe and Disclose, citing fear of reprisals, described tens of thousands of litres reaching the river and marshes where local people draw water, vegetation turning black and the fish disappearing. The same site had leaked in June 2020, when Gabonese authorities documented 20 barrels entering the Missala River and identified a faulty pipeline.

Residents of Etimboué in western Gabon allege the company buries oil and drilling waste directly in the ground. It has also been accused of intimidating residents and dismissing employees who raise alarms. In 2021 the Network of Free Civil Society Organisations for Good Governance in Gabon filed suit over what it described as widespread breaches of environmental law.

A report published by the Environmental Investigation Agency in June last year went further, alleging that after a fatal accident workers improperly disposed of human remains and evidence on a platform, and that group management intimidated a witness and bribed a prosecutor.

What oil money bought

The proceeds have gone into assets with better reputations.

The family owns about 150 hectares of Bordeaux vineyard through a holding company called Pelwyn, comprising Labégorce, Marquis d'Alesme and Château La Tour de Mons, acquired in 2019. Nathalie Perrodo-Samani took charge of the estates at 27, two years after her father's death, launching a white wine called Saam Long in 2024 and opening a restaurant at Marquis d'Alesme. They are majority owners of Konbini, the French online news outlet aimed at younger readers, and have invested in halal charcuterie and packaged Italian food. Filings have shown a $21 million office and apartment building in SoHo in New York and property in Spain. Carrie Perrodo, born in Hong Kong and a model in the 1970s before founding her own agency, lives in London.

Perenco is meanwhile preparing carbon capture and storage projects in Britain and continuing to bid for licences worldwide. The company that built its fortune on assets the majors discarded is positioning for the next phase of the same trade, buying what larger companies are being pressed by their shareholders to leave behind.

The difference is that the bill for the first three decades will be calculated in a Paris courtroom, some time in the next eighteen months.