Didier Pineau-Valencienne, former big boss of French industry, notably within the Schneider group and passionate about literature, died Thursday December 19 at the age of 93, his family announced. The burial mass will be celebrated Tuesday in Boulogne-Billancourt, and he will be buried Friday in the cemetery of Saint-Hilaire-du-Bois in Vendée, where he was from, according to a notice published in Le Figaro .
«DPV» remained at the head of the Schneider electrical equipment group for 18 years, before handing over the reins in 1999, having reached the age limit. Born on March 21, 1931 into a family of Vendée doctors, this father of four children, a practicing Catholic, chose business for his part. A student at the Janson de Sailly high school in Paris, he joined HEC, before the business school of Dartmouth College in the United States.
His career began at Gallimard Editions, where he satisfied his passion for poetry and met André Malraux and Albert Camus. But the world of publishing turns out to be too narrow for Didier Pineau-Valencienne. In 1958 he joined the Franco-Belgian group Empain-Schneider. He managed subsidiaries in difficulty there, before joining Rhône-Poulenc in 1973, where he refined his image as a business recovery under the authority of Jean Gandois, future boss of bosses. In 1981, Didier Pineau-Valencienne returned to Schneider.
The architect of the Schneider group
In 18 years, he transformed this conglomerate of more than 150 companies and 132,000 employees, which he refocused on the electricity professions. In 1981, Schneider withdrew from the steel industry, selling Usinor and Sacilor. Shipyards are sold, railways, packaging, machine tools, sports and leisure activities, telephony, real estate… “DPV breaks it”according to one of its nicknames, could not avoid the resounding liquidation of Creusot-Loire in 1984, the largest bankruptcy in French industry with nearly 30,000 employees affected.
Through epic stock market battles, he brought the Grenoble-based Télémécanique into the hands of his group, then the American juggernaut Square D. In 18 years, turnover increased 17-fold and the group was free of debt. But in 1994, Didier Pineau-Valencienne was charged with forgery and fraud for alleged irregularities in the management of two Belgian subsidiaries. Coming to Brussels for interrogation, he was incarcerated for twelve days.
This affair forced him to step aside in 1997 behind Ernest-Antoine Seillière when he succeeded Jean Gandois as president of the National Council of French Employers (CNPF, now Medef). Ultimately he was found guilty in 2006, but was not sentenced due in particular to the age of the facts. At the beginning of 2020, we could see him again, alert and smiling, on television sets, this time for a book dedicated to his love of reading.
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