Bruno Bertez

Bruno Bertez, born in September 1944, is a French press CEO specializing in financial information. CEO of a press group specializing in economics and finance, he founded the daily newspaper La Tribune. He writes regularly in the Swiss business daily, L'Agefi. He is a regular blogger for the information sites Blog à Lupus, brunobertez.com, Atlantico and Lesobservers.ch.

Biography
Born on September 20, 1944, in Anzin, in the Nord, Bruno Bertez is the son of Léon Bertez, without profession, and Yvette Lallement. Graduate of HEC Paris, class of 1967. Member of SFAF, French Society of Financial Analysts (1969). He went into business as an authorized representative in a Parisian stockbroker position, then became an advisor and journalist at La Vie française, an economic weekly of moderate and conservative orientation, of which he took control in 1979 with the help his banker friend Jean-Pierre Peyraud and another journalist, Noël Mettey. This newspaper has just undergone two successive tests, the rise in power of the competitor Investir, a financial weekly created in 1974 by part of the La Vie française team, at the time of the first transfer of this title by the Hachette group, and the appearance in 1979 of Mieux Vivre Votre Argent, a monthly heritage magazine created by Jean-Antoine Bouchez.

Known to be close to Jean-Pierre Chevènement's CERES, Bruno Bertez was a candidate in the 1980s for the purchase of two major regional daily press titles then coveted by Robert Hersant: L'Union and Le Progrès. Despite the support of a public bank, Crédit Lyonnais, he was beaten by Robert Hersant.

However, on January 19, 1984, he succeeded in expanding his group by purchasing the economic and financial daily L'Agefi from Michelin, Peugeot, and several recently nationalized groups. In difficulty, the newspaper is also the owner of a general daily with a confidential circulation, Le Nouveau Journal, with a more politicized and more polemical tone, heir to the business of the daily L'Information, bought by Raymond Bourgine in 1967. Michelin and Peugeot remain minority shareholders of the new financial information group. The transaction was carried out for a pittance, but the operation nevertheless cost Bruno Bertez more than 23 million francs, because 73 employees invoked the transfer clause and left Le Nouveau Journal in the first half of 1984, according to the report presented to the general meeting of shareholders in the spring of 1985.

Bertez then created, in January 1985, another economic daily, La Tribune: La Tribune has two editions, one in the morning under the name Tribune de L'Économie, the other in the evening under the name Tribune de La Bourse. The last journalists remaining at the Nouveau Journal were integrated into La Tribune, which used for its launch the 23 million francs in profits from La Vie française and the 35 million francs obtained from the sale of the building at 106-108 rue de Richelieu, historic headquarters of the Agefi group, which hosted La Tribune from its beginnings. In mid-1986, a violent conflict pitted him against the Book Union over the future of its printer, Imprimerie de la Presse Nouvelle. At the same time he joined forces with Robert Maxwell for the takeover of the ACP, the Central Press Agency which supplies the provincial press in competition with the AFP. Former President of Agefi Switzerland, he then became advisor to his new owner, Alain Fabarez until his death.

In 1986, he secretly allied with Bernard Tapie to prepare a takeover project for the Boussac textile group, but was overtaken by Bernard Arnault's group, an operation that a journalist from La Tribune, Laurent Mauduit, heard about. Two years after the creation of La Tribune, the daily's circulation plateaued, leading Bruno Bertez to decide to sell it in March 1987 to the publishing group of L'Expansion, which also bought L'Agefi and La Vie française. The buyer, Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, was editorial director of the rival daily Les Échos in the 1960s, when the latter was sold to the British group Pearson, due to family disagreement. The circulation of La Tribune, which had already started to increase before the arrival of the new shareholder, with the economic and stock market recovery resulting from the oil counter-shock, continued to increase and paid circulation reached 43,500 copies in 1991.