The intruder of the news of the day is Mohed Altrad, one of his co-defendants at the trial where Bernard Laporte, the boss of French rugby, appeared. A trial which opened in Paris on Wednesday, September 7. A construction billionaire who himself emerged as an intruder in rugby in Montpellier until becoming French champion for the first time in the history of the club. Remember, it was June 24, 2022:
The Brennus shield presented to supporters, exactly 11 years after Mohed Altrad became the majority shareholder of the club instead of the Nicolin group thanks to a check for 2.4 million euros. Seeing him become president had driven crazy Louis Nicolin, the mayor who had himself put in a million a few months earlier.
In a decade, Altrad, the discreet, the big boss with a voice as thin as Nicolin or Laporte are big mouths, has become a key man in French rugby, until appearing on suspicion of favoritism and active corruption in the trial which s is open today. He is suspected of having bought his friend the president of the Federation, 180,000 euros for communication operations of which justice has never found a trace. That same year 2017, Bernard Laporte awarded the jersey sponsor of the Blues to his Altrad group for 1.7 million euros and confirmed with a second contract of 35 million euros in January 2018 in which the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office sees the mark of a corruption.
Before rugby, Mohed Altrad’s journey is in fact a succession of intrusions (in a way). It begins at birth, the date of which he does not know. If you look at his Facebook page, it says he was born in 1948 or 1951. Which means he’s 71 or 74, he doesn’t know that like a lot of Bedouins. Except that in addition to being born in the Syrian desert, he is the fruit of a rape by a tribal chief, of a teenager (his mother) who will die very shortly afterwards. Officially, he does not have to study but he tells in one of his books that he followed the teachings of a teacher, literally through the keyhole, until he obtained a baccalaureate. Thanks to a scholarship from the Syrian government, he landed in Montpellier in 1970. He talks about it as his second birth, it ends with a doctorate in computer science.
Altrad is building a veritable empire with hardly a penny at the start. After a few jobs, he bought a box of scaffolding. You’re going to tell me “it doesn’t feel like a success story”. He came from IT, had no management experience but his intuition made him think that, anywhere, to change a light bulb in an airport for example, you need scaffolding. He straightened the box, invested in several others to found this group which today employs 52,000 people with 170 subsidiaries and become embedded (once again) among the 30 largest fortunes in France.
He is therefore a billionaire and we say to ourselves but what is he doing in rugby, especially in Montpellier. The Hérault city is more of a football town. Montpellier is not Castres. MHR is not OM. There is no rugby religion. Is this still one of his intuitions? No doubt also, a political ambition which also leads him to run for the municipal elections of 2020.
I was telling you about his slender voice, you have to hear it in his campaign clip for the second round tirelessly retracing the story of the Syrian orphan.
Not really a tribune at heart, he finished third with 18.2% of the vote at the head of a somewhat improbable 2nd round team for the apolitical candidate whom he claims to be alongside comedian Rémi Gaillard, from the head of the LFI list and a dissident ecologist. If he is not a tribune, Mohed Altrad remains an outstanding negotiator. Who will even have managed to convince the All Blacks of New Zealand to wear, like the Blues, the Montpellier logo of Altrad on their jersey.