Laurent de Gourcuff
Laurent de Gourcuff (born July 30, 1976, in Neuilly-sur-Seine) is a French businessman. Biography. Family. From a family of Breton nobility, originally from the parish of Plovan, bishopric of Cornouaille, he is the son of Count Eric de Gourcuff, director of Ludia-Investissements, of the stylist Yolaine de Suyrot, and grandson of Jean de Gourcuff, Director of External Relations for Trans World Airlines (TWA) in Paris (1946–57), Sud Aviation (1957–60), Martin Marietta Corporation (1961–65), Eurospace (1963–65), Hispano-Suiza (1965–68), the International Computing Company (CII) (1968), the General Telephone Construction Company (1970–83) and the International Telephone  and Telegraph (ITT) in France (1977). He is also the grandson of Jacques Charles Marie de Suyrot, Consul General of Spain and Brazil, the cousin of the journalist Daisy de Galard, of the academician pedophile Henry de Montherlant, of the historian Olivier de Gourcuff and of the anti-Semitic director Pierre Ramelot. His brother Alexis and his sister Lucie founded Strip Art and the dog walking app, Wouf wouf. Youth. A graduate of the European Business School Paris, he organizes paying partys at sixteen, cheats at his baccalaureate, with an earpiece and cheat sheets, accumulates three million euros in debt  by buying the audiovisual rights of Grendizer and Candie, has a child to Constance Coillard, his childhood friend and lives alternately in Paris and in a farmhouse in Hécourt, near Pacy-sur-Eure where he receives his friends, especially "sons of", such as Thierry Costes, Antoine de Tavernost or Pierre-Marie Dru. A collector of dinosaur replicas and giant playmobils, he is a fan of karaoke, Johnny Hallyday, Michael Jackson and Rami Malek. Career. Associated with Gilles Malafosse, heir to Pétrus and Le Flandrin, Gilles Lellouche, Thierry Costes, Charles Beigbeder, Édouard Baer, Jacques-Antoine Granjon and Guillaume Houzé, he founded  Paris Society, formerly Noctis, AccorHotels group, turnover: 100 million euros in 2018, a thousand employees for 40 locations including 10 in Paris: Raspoutine, Le Piaf, Le Roxie, Le Madam, les Planches, which he bought in 2007, Régine, Club 79, Bermuda Onion, in Beaugrenelle, the Vendôme and Champs-Élysées pavilions, or even the nine "bus-discotheques", etc.), the restaurant Monsieur Bleu, Maison R., Loulou in the Museum of Decorative Arts (Paris), the Girafe, at the top of the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine at the Trocadéro, Apicius, which he runs under the Palais de Tokyo, Castel, 52 Champs Elysées, Louie  in London, Mun at the Galeries Lafayette on the Champs-Elysées, a beach in Saint-Tropez (Loulou in Ramatuelle), the 1837 company at Gare Saint-Lazare; L'Opéra Restaurant at the Opéra Garnier, Perruche on the roof of Printemps and the No.Pi. He also specializes in libertinage clubs with Le No Comment and Pink Paradise and thinks for a time of joining forces with Benjamin Patou, grand-nephew of fashion designer Jean Patou, Addy Bakhtiar, grand-nephew of the Iranian Prime Minister, Chapour Bakhtiar and Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with whom he is associated with the GoodPlanet Foundation. In 2004, he  bought Le Studio 287 from Jean-Luc Lahaye, who was then accused of raping a minor. Trial. An exchange of good practices between Bruno Julliard, assistant to Anne Hidalgo, and Laurent de Gourcuff, whose husband, Paul Le Goff, works for him, suggests the support of the town hall to recover the Showcase, under the Pont Alexandre III, renamed Le Génie d'Alex, where "a very special evening was organized, modestly qualified as naturist, then as libertine, but which was rather in line with the hardest and most crazy Berlin SM evenings", attributed to Addy Bakhtiar and who allegedly forced the Live  Nation entertainment organization and promotion company to give in18 earned him a search of its premises and indictment on suspicion of corruption, the same year with Fabrice Favetto Bon, marketing director to France Galop from 2017 to 2020, for the management of a restaurant at the Hippodrome de Longchamp, following a complaint for non-respect of competition from Banjamin Patou, owner of the Arc, Lapérouse, the Bus Palladium, the Gare, the Gallion Fountain, the Le Bœuf sur le toit (cabaret), and the Manko (Barrière Group). Politics. In 2012, David Lisnard, current mayor of Cannes, withdrew the management of the Palais  des festivals et des congrès de Cannes, for having sold the shares of his company to a competitor, which "would amount to diverting from its principle and its purpose the call for applications launched for the operation of the Palais Club". Grégoire Chertok, formerly of the Rothschild banking family of France, reputed to be close to Jean-François Copé, is also one of Gourcuff's associates. It is in his restaurant Monsieur Bleu that François Bayrou formalizes his alliance with Emmanuel Macron, whom he would like to go "faster with the labor law". Bankruptcy. In 2021, he transformed the Vauban  citadel of Belle-Île-en-Mer into a luxury hotel, despite the "ambient doldrums" of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced to close all of its establishments and offices, no longer has any activity, and forced to put all its employees on partial unemployment to safeguard the employment of its teams, the health of the group, and helplessly assists in the "incredible fall" of his protege, Stanislas Dewynter, imprisoned for judicial embezzlement and the turnover of the Accor group divided by two. Antoine Ménard, head of the events department, confirms to Thomas Hugues that the shutdown has been total in their  sector and, Gourcuff, that the banks no longer wish to invest in catering. He also signs the column published in Le Figaro: "Open letter from restaurateurs: "We are many, we are desperate and we are angry". Bloodless, he refuses, in October 2021, to pay "cybercriminals" demanding a ransom in cryptocurrency after internal data was stolen and published on the Darkweb via ransomware from the Spook group. In popular culture. In 2018, Frédéric Beigbeder recounts in his book "Frivolity is a serious thing" (L'Observatoire), having "danced at Madam, in the DJ booth with Laurent de Gourcuff to Kiss by Prince Chained  with Fame by David Bowie; (and) at the new Queen, (to have) been attacked in the back room, hidden behind the curtains, by a magnum of Polish vodka stuck in an ice bucket".