The Hermès heir who planned to leave billions to his gardener now says his fortune is gone

An Hermès storefront in Hong Kong.

Nicolas Puech, a descendant of Hermès’ founder, Thierry Hermès, made headlines last year after he reportedly planned to leave half his fortune to his former gardener — but he’s now saying his billions have disappeared.

The 81-year-old has alleged in court filings that he no longer owns 6 million shares of Hermès worth about $13 billion and that his former wealth manager of more than two decades, Eric Freymond, played a part in the loss, the Swiss investigative news outlet Gotham City reported.

But a Swiss court threw out Puech’s allegations earlier this month, writing that the alleged fraud was “undetectable to common mortals,” according to Bloomberg.

The Swiss news outlet Tribune de Genève reported that the stock was deposited in a Geneva bank in 2012 but that it’s now unclear where the shares are.

Geneva’s Public Prosecutor’s Office had declined to investigate based on Peuch’s allegations. The court’s decision on July 24 backed up the prosecutors’ decision.

Peuch’s lawyers, Grégoire Mangeat and Fanny Margairaz, told B-17 in a statement that they were “in the process of studying the criminal file in detail” and declined to comment further.

“My client is shocked by the accusation of his former client,” an attorney for Freymond, Stéphane Grodecki, told B-17 in a statement, adding that Freymond never handled the stocks in question.

Freymond is examining legal possibilities to “to defend his honor,” Grodecki said.

Puech, who is 81 and has no children, previously owned 5.7% of Hermès as its largest individual shareholder, the Tribune de Genève reported last year.

Hermès was founded in 1837 as a horse-saddle maker, and the brand has since evolved into the ultimate status symbol — and is a rare outlier in a slumping luxury market in China, where it recently reported steady sales.

Before Peuch decided to adopt his former employee and bequeath him his multibillion-dollar fortune, he’d planned to leave his inheritance to the Isocrates Foundation, Bloomberg reported — a nonprofit he founded dedicated to public-interest journalism.

Bloomberg reported that the future of the foundation was in question. In November 2023, the foundation said it would no longer accept new funding requests.