Billionaire Pierre Castel's family cannot remove the man running its African beer empire

The family that owns Africa's second-largest beer and soft drinks producer has started attacking itself in public.

Castel operates in 22 African countries including Ivory Coast, Ghana, Morocco and Angola, runs more than 80 production sites across beer, soft drinks, sugar, bottled water and spirits, and generated €6.9 billion of revenue in 2025, about $8 billion, according to The Africa Report. It sits alongside Coca-Cola Beverages Africa and Heineken among the largest private players in the continent's drinks industry.

What it does not have is agreement on who should run it.

Four branches of the family published a statement on Aug. 28 distancing themselves from Romy Castel, the daughter of founder Pierre Castel. They said she represents a single branch holding 20% of the company and blamed her legal proceedings for the media attention the group has attracted, adding that most family members want the management team left alone to do its job.

Romy Castel replied the next day alongside her cousins Alain and Philippe. They said shareholders had voted by more than 70% on Feb. 2 to dismiss chief executive Grégory Clerc, that they were never consulted about the Aug. 28 statement, and that they dispute the signature attached to it. Only part of two branches supported it, they said.

Two statements a day apart, from the same family, describing incompatible versions of who holds power.

Clerc is 41 and a former tax lawyer who advised the family before taking the job in 2023, the first outsider to run the group. His removal has become the central fight, and the heirs have not managed it despite the February vote they cite. An earlier attempt at a Singapore meeting on Jan. 8 failed on procedural grounds, and when they announced in February that Clerc and chairman Pierre Baer had been voted out, the board of the Singapore holding company rejected the resolutions as invalid the same day.

The dispute has spread well beyond his position. It is running through the group's governance bodies, through the Singapore courts, and through specific assets. Romy and Alain Castel have lost their board seats at Castel Vins. The sale of Société Sucrière du Cameroun, announced in June, has reopened tensions between the heirs and management. The Cameroonian sugar producer is controlled by Somdia, another group subsidiary.

Alain Castel had already been removed from the boards of Cassiopée and D.F. Holding in December, which cut direct family oversight of two operating entities and triggered the public phase of the conflict.

What underlies all of it is a succession that was never settled. Pierre Castel is 99 and built the business from a Bordeaux trading operation in 1949, working by handshake and avoiding mobile phones and computers throughout. Bloomberg reported in 2022 that it was unclear who actually owned the company or what would happen when he died. The current management structure arrived after Swiss authorities fined him €350 million in 2023 over long-running tax offences.

The African operations have kept trading. Breweries, bottling plants and sugar mills across nearly two dozen countries continue running while the people who own them argue in press statements about which of them speaks for the family.