Edouard Stern
| Édouard Stern | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 18, 1954 Paris, France |
| Died | February 28, 2005 (aged 50) Geneva, Switzerland |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Banker |
| Notable work | Bank Stern |
Édouard Stern (October 18, 1954 – February 28, 2005) was a French banker famously murdered by a prostitute in Geneva, Switzerland. At the time of his death, he was the 38th richest French citizen.
Édouard Stern was born in 1954 to one of France’s wealthiest families, the owners of the private investment house Banque Stern. His father, Antoine Jean Stern is a descendant of a notable family of bankers, going back to 19th-century Frankfurt, and his mother was Christiane Laroche, former wife of French journalist and politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.
Keen to follow in his father's footsteps, Stern graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (ESSEC Business School) in Paris with a degree in finance before joining the family's private investment house in 1977.
Aged 22, Stern took the reigns of Banque Stern with a clear mandate to revitalize the nearly bankrupt institution. During the 1980s, Stern revamped the bank, expanding its activity in financial markets, as well as in mergers and acquisitions. In 1985, Stern sold the bank for 300 million francs ($60 million in 2005 dollars) to Lebanese investors. Thanks to a clause attached to the contract, Stern got to keep the copyright over his last name. Immediately after the sale went through, Stern started a new bank, with a similar name and business profile, drawing in many of his former clients. He sold this second institution for an estimated 1.75 billion francs in 1988 to the Swiss Bank Corporation (SBS, which will later merge with UBS to form UBS S.A.). As a result of these transactions, Stern shot up the ranks of the richest families in France, occupying the 38th spot, according to Forbes.
In 1992, he joined Lazard Frères as managing partner and quickly became one of the firm's star bankers and heir-apparent. He tried to reduce overhead and bring in younger partners but clashed with Michael David-Weill, the bank's head and his father-in-law. He quit Lazard Frères in 1997 and set up his own investment fund, Investment Real Returns (IRR). He owned half and the remainder was held by Eurazeo, a Lazard holding company and Mainz Holdings Ltd., a U.S. Virgin Islands firm that Stern wholly owned. He maintained cordial relations with David-Weill, who invested $300 million in IRR.
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