FIDES Trustees SA

About FIDES Trustees SA

FIDES Trustees SA is the Geneva trust company of the Fides group, whose Luxembourg holding company, Fides Holdings SA, holds its shares.^[1] Since 31 May 2025 the Austrian Firmenbuch has carried it as a shareholder of Red Bull GmbH.^[2] The stake is the 2 % that Chalerm Yoovidhya, son of the Red Bull co-founder Chaleo Yoovidhya, had held for some four decades and transferred to the company on 20 May 2025, worth about USD 1.1 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index; a Red Bull spokesperson called such fiduciary solutions common for ensuring long-term continuity in large, successful companies.^[3] The company is licensed by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority as a trustee under the Financial Institutions Act and supervised by the Organisme de Surveillance des Instituts Financiers.^[4]

The company was entered in the Geneva commercial register in 2010, the year the Fides group was founded.^[5][1] In July 2017 Fides Holdings SA announced that it had bought Ariannol Trustees (Suisse) SA, a Geneva trust company founded in 2012 by Martin Bowen, and that it would be integrated into FIDES Trustees SA under its managing director Robert Darlington.^[1] In April 2019 the share capital was raised from CHF 100,000 to CHF 1,000,000 by set-off of claims.^[6] On 4 September 2019 FIDES Trustees SA took over the assets and liabilities of Ariannol, which was struck from the register by merger; the register records that the whole share capital of the two companies was held by the same shareholder, so the merger brought neither a capital increase nor an allotment of shares, and the 2017 acquisition names that shareholder as Fides Holdings SA.^[7][8][1] Fides Holdings SA is also the registered person with significant control of the group's London company, Fides Consultants Ltd, with 75 % or more of its shares and votes.^[9] On 18 June 2024 the company announced that FINMA had granted it its trustee licence.^[10] Under statutes of 17 October 2024 the Swiss commercial register carries it at rue de la Croix-d'Or 19 in Geneva under UID CHE-115.815.767 with a new purpose: to create and manage companies, trusts and similar legal structures and to act as a trustee within the meaning of article 17(2) of the Financial Institutions Act, holding, managing, acquiring and disposing of assets and securities in its own name or for trust beneficiaries.^[11]