Albert, Baron Frère is a Belgian businessman and the richest man in Belgium.

Frère grew up as a son of a nail merchant and helped in the business since an early age. His father died when Frère was 17; Frère had to leave school and run the family business by himself. At the age of 30, he started investing in Belgian steel factories and by the end of the 1970s he practically controlled the whole steel industry in the region of Charleroi. He foresaw the coming steel crisis of the late 1970s and sold his enterprises to the Belgian state after merging them with the competing steel firm Cockerill to create Cockerill-Sambre

Cockerill-Sambre

Cockerill-Sambre was a group of Belgian steel manufacturers headquartered in Seraing , on the Meuse River, and in Charleroi, on the shore of the Sambre River....

.

Frère used the proceeds from this sale to build an investment empire around the Swiss holding company Pargesa which he founded with the Canadian investor Paul Desmarais

Paul Desmarais

Paul Desmarais, Sr., is a Canadian financier in Montreal. With an estimated net worth of $US 4.5 billion , Desmarais was ranked by Forbes as the 4th wealthiest person in Canada and 235th in the world.Desmarais also owns homes in Palm Beach, Florida and New York.He is CEO of the Power Corporation...

. Pargesa took over the Belgian holding company Groupe Bruxelles Lambert

Groupe Bruxelles Lambert

Groupe Bruxelles Lambert is a Belgian industrial holding company. It is one of the ten biggest Belgian companies, and part of the BEL20. It has been listed in Brussels since 1956.Shareholdings as of 31 December 2010 were:...

 in 1982 and over the year added significant stakes in such wide ranging Belgian companies as Petrofina

Petrofina

Petrofina was a Belgian oil company which merged with Total in 1999 to form TotalFina, but the name has now been changed back to Total after another merger...

, Royale Belge Insurance, Compagnie Luxembourgoise de Télédiffusion (CLT)

RTL Group

RTL Group is Europe's largest TV, radio and production company, and is majority-owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. It has 45 television and 32 radio stations in 11 countries...

, and Tractebel. He actively promoted international consolidation of the sectors in which he was involved, selling Banque Bruxelles Lambert to ING Group

ING Group

The ING Group is a global financial institution offering retail banking, direct banking, commercial banking, investment banking, asset management, and insurance services. ING is the Dutch member of the Inter-Alpha Group of Banks, a cooperative consortium of 11 prominent European banks...

, Royale Belge to Axa

AXA

AXA S.A. is a French global insurance group headquartered in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. AXA is a conglomerate of independently run businesses, operated according to the laws and regulations of many different countries. The AXA group of companies engage in life, health and other forms of...

, Tractebel to Suez, Petrofina to Total S.A.

Total S.A.

Total S.A. is a French multinational oil company and one of the six "Supermajor" oil companies in the world.Its businesses cover the entire oil and gas chain, from crude oil and natural gas exploration and production to power generation, transportation, refining, petroleum product marketing, and...

, and RTL to Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann AG is a multinational media corporation founded in 1835, based in Gütersloh, Germany. The company operates in 63 countries and employs 102,983 workers , which makes it the most international media corporation in the world. In 2008 the company reported a €16.118 billion consolidated...

.

Frère is married and has three children. In 2002, he received the title of baron

Baron

Baron is a title of nobility. The word baron comes from Old French baron, itself from Old High German and Latin baro meaning " man, warrior"; it merged with cognate Old English beorn meaning "nobleman"...

 from the Belgian king Albert II

Albert II of Belgium

Albert II is the current reigning King of the Belgians, a constitutional monarch. He is a member of the royal house "of Belgium"; formerly this house was named Saxe-Coburg-Gotha...

. He is a co-owner, together with Bernard Arnault

Bernard Arnault

Bernard Arnault is a French business magnate who is best known as the chairman and CEO of the French conglomerate LVMH. According to Forbes Magazine, Arnault is the world's 4th and Europe's richest person, with a 2011 net worth of US$41 billion.-Education and business career:Arnault was born...

 of LVMH

LVMH

LVMH Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton S.A., better known as LVMH, is a French multinational luxury goods conglomerate headquartered in Paris, Île-de-France, France. The company was formed after the 1987 merger of fashion house Louis Vuitton with Moët Hennessy, a company formed after the 1971 merger...

, of the Château Cheval Blanc

Château Cheval Blanc

Château Cheval Blanc , is a wine producer in Saint-Émilion in the Bordeaux wine region of France. Its wine is one of only two to receive the highest rank of Premier Grand Cru Classé status in the Classification of Saint-Émilion wine of 1955, along with Château Ausone.The estate's second wine is...

 winery near Bordeaux

Bordeaux

Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...

. He is a member of the Cercle Gaulois

Cercle Gaulois

The Cercle Gaulois or Cercle Royal Gaulois Artistique et Littéraire is a Belgian club. The club has the aim of constituting a friendly, intellectual, artistic and literary, meeting place, free of any political, cultural or philosophical tendency...

Overview over Albert Frère's shareholdings as of May 2009

External links

• Albert Frère in the 2009 Forbes billionaires' list
• A discreet dynamo. The Economist, 20 April 2006.