In Focus | Africa, France
The big clearance sale of "France-Africa" Gatsby Vincent Miclet
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Fifteen years after having left Angola, the country that made him rich, Vincent Miclet, the last French businessman to have made his fortune in Africa, still flaunts the aura of magnificence which he has always found ways of keeping up. But this golden aura hides a reality which is much less glorious. Miclet, who has never succeeded in reproducing the success he had in Angola, has in recent months been obliged to sell off many of his property, aviation and oil assets.
In the Franco-African "village", his is the most visible fortune. Its lustre is carefully maintained via a Rolls-Royce with a "VM" number plate double-parked on Paris's chic Avenue Montaigne, Instagram photos of his sumptuous Moroccan property, the Domaine du Cheval d'Or, and noisy admonishments of the personnel in the lobbies of Africa's luxury hotels. Miclet's fortune, which was acquired in the 1990s and early 2000s during the reign of Angola's former Casa Militar chief, the all-powerful General
