World: Castel heiress fails to secure dismissal of group CEO

This Thursday, January 8 in Singapore, Romy Castel, the heiress of the Castel group, one of the world's heavyweights in wine and drinks trading and production, was unable to secure the dismissal of Gregory Clerc, the CEO who took over in 2023. A global saga whose last straw was the removal of Alain Castel from the Luxembourg holding company in early December, Delano.lu reported.

"I am the sole guarantor of my father's values!" Romy Castel, 52, heiress to the late founder of the Castel empire, broke with her legendary discretion on Thursday in an interview with Challenges and in a press release. On the eve of an extraordinary general meeting of the Investment Beverage Business Fund, in Singapore, the bridgehead of the company, Romy Castel stated that she had obtained 97% of the voting rights to dismiss Gregory Clerc, the CEO of the group since 2023. According to Bloomberg, she was unable to register these voting rights in order to achieve her aims. In this kind of situation, in Luxembourg, the next step is to go to court but a new general meeting is expected to be held in late January, according to the family, as quoted by AFP. “Gregory Clerc does not hold any equity stake in IBBM and therefore does not take part in shareholders’ votes. He regrets that false or misleading information is circulating, which is damaging the group’s overall reputation,” AFP added, citing a statement attributed to the Castel Group.

The last straw was the removal from the Group's Luxembourg holding company, D. F. Holding, of a nephew of the founder, Alain Castel, on 8 December, as a new episode in an unwritten strategy, according to the family, to appropriate the empire. This salvo on his father's values responds to the idea, regularly repeated by the CEO with 31 mandates, that he is managing and developing the group perhaps not in the way the heirs would like, but according to the principles that guided its founder.

Founded in 1949 by Pierre Castel, the Castel Group is now one of France's largest private groups. Historically built on wine trading and production, over the decades it has become a major player in the drinks sector, with a particularly strong presence in Africa. Castel is the beer leader on the African continent, the world's third-largest wine producer by volume, and the owner of a number of iconic brands in France, including the Maison Nicolas network of wine merchants and Château Beychevelle. The group is present in more than twenty African countries and employs more than 40,000 people. According to information provided by the group, its sales amounted to €6.5bn in 2024.

Financially, the 2024 consolidated accounts of D. F. Holding, the group's Luxembourg-registered holding company which employs 40 people at Avenue de la Liberté, describe an overall situation of marked solidity. According to the financial statements, in 2024 the group achieved consolidated sales of €4.82bn, up on 2023 (€4.71bn), and generated operating cash flow of €1.19bn, compared with €895m a year earlier.

The cash structure appears robust. Despite net investments of €529.6m over the year, cash flow remained balanced overall, with a positive cash flow variation of €12.7m at the end of 2024, after a decrease of €136m in 2023. Cash flows from financing activities were negative at €642.2m, mainly reflecting dividend payments and financial repayments, with no apparent pressure on the Group's liquidity.

Debt and commitments remain contained in relation to cash generation capacity. According to the notes to the financial statements, consolidated provisions and financial commitments totalled around €320m at the end of December 2024, broadly unchanged from the previous year. Management also points out that specific provisions have been set aside for legal, tax and employee-related risks, particularly in Africa, and that these are not considered likely to have a material adverse effect on the consolidated financial position.

These figures show that the Group has a high capacity to generate cash, a financial structure that is not severely constrained and significant room for manoeuvre. They confirm that the current sequence is not the result of an economic or financial downturn, but is part of a context of governance tensions and control of decision-making structures, without calling into question the Group's operational performance.

It is against this backdrop that Grégory Clerc was appointed Chief Executive Officer in 2023. A Swiss national, Grégory Clerc is 39 years old and has an atypical profile in the world of wine and beer. A lawyer by training, with law degrees from the universities of Geneva and Zurich and a postgraduate master's degree in taxation, he began his career in Swiss law firms before co-founding a consultancy. He then joined the Castel group as a tax lawyer and adviser to Pierre Castel, with whom he worked for several years. This professional relationship led him to join the group's boards of directors and strategic committees, before becoming its executive director. In interviews with the press, Gregory Clerc has claimed this non-industrial background as an asset, citing the need for a "fresh look" at a changing industry.

Since his appointment, he has put forward a strategy of strengthening local roots in Africa, presented in particular in an interview with Forbes Afrique, where he describes himself as a "hands-on CEO", indicating that he has visited all the Group's African subsidiaries and emphasising that the vast majority of local staff are not expatriates. These factors have helped to establish his managerial legitimacy, without however extinguishing internal tensions.

After the vote in Singapore, Gregory Clerc remains CEO of the Castel group. While the Extraordinary General Meeting did not change the Group's executive balance, it did confirm the existence of lasting tensions between family heritage and managerial governance within a major private group, whose decision-making structures are now split between Singapore and Luxembourg, with no immediate question marks over its management or financial performance. Contacted, the group had not got back to us at the time of publishing this article.

09 January, 2026