Générale Occidentale

About Générale Occidentale

Générale Occidentale was the French investment company through which James Goldsmith held his businesses, and it is on this site as the company above Cavenham Foods, the group that owned the Southport toffee maker J A & P Holland. Grace's Guide records that Cavenham effectively became a subsidiary of Générale Occidentale of France in 1977, the year its offer of 160p a share for the Cavenham minority closed oversubscribed and the shares left the London Stock Exchange.^[1][2] Compagnie Générale d'Électricité bought control of it in July 1987, and Havas took it in October 1995.^[3][2]

Wikipedia dates the company's founding to 1969 in its summary while its own narrative traces the name to October 1968, when Goldsmith's Union de Participations bought the French bank and property group Société Générale Foncière and renamed it Société Générale Occidentale; Union de Participations itself took the Générale Occidentale name shortly after February 1970 and became the holding company for all of Goldsmith's interests.^[2] The company bought Chocolat Poulain and SEGMA, the maker of Maille, in 1979, sold its whole food arm to Boussois-Souchon-Neuvesel, later Danone, in 1980, and took shares in Cavenham when Cavenham was wound up in March 1986.^[2]

Compagnie Générale d'Électricité had become a shareholder in 1979 for 14 million dollars, and the group was held through Trocadéro Participations, the holding company Encyclopædia Universalis names as Générale Occidentale's principal shareholder.^[2][3] On 27 July 1987 Goldsmith sold the 51 per cent of Trocadéro Participations he held to Compagnie Générale d'Électricité, privatised that May, for 1.5 billion francs; CGE owned the other 49 per cent, and Wikipedia records that the purchase gave it 34 per cent of Générale Occidentale and control, together with the stakes in the Grand Union supermarkets, the oil company Basic Resources International and the publishers Groupe Express and Presses de la Cité.^[3][2] Gilberte Beaux left as managing director shortly afterwards, Grand Union was sold to a management buyout in 1988, and Presses de la Cité was merged that year with the Havas subsidiary CEP Communication to form Groupe de la Cité.^[2] Compagnie Générale d'Électricité, by then Alcatel Alsthom, turned Générale Occidentale into a publishing house and in October 1995 swapped it for a 21.2 per cent stake in Havas S.A., which took L'Express, Le Point, Courrier International and Le Vif with it.^[2]