FB Roundup Aliko Dangote, Zygmunt Solorz, Petter Olsen

Aliko Dangote to set up a family office in Dubai

The march for families to open offices in Dubai continues. Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote has said that he intends to set up a family office in Dubai. 

In early September Leon Black, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management, announced plans to open an office there, joining hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, India’s Adani family and Russian steel magnate Vladimir Lisin.

In an interview with Bloomberg, he said that the motivation was to look for global investments to diversify the group’s holdings beyond industrials. The office will initially look to co-invest with families, firms or institutions that bring unique expertise of sectors and companies.

Dangote is estimated to be worth around $11.6 billion by Forbes. He owes his wealth to the eponymously named Dangote Cement which is Africa’s largest cement producer and in which he still holds an 85% share. 

He has diversified into a wide range of commodities and last year opened The Dangote Petroleum Refinery, a 650,000 barrels per day (BPD) integrated refinery project in the Lekki Free Zone near Lagos. 

Earlier this year, Dangote Industries was named the most valuable brand in Nigeria. 

The office in Dubai is managed by Dangote’s daughter Halima.

Solorz family infighting hits Cyfrowy shares

Shares in Polish media, energy and telecoms group Cyfrowy Polsat have fallen 15.2% over the past month as reports emerged that the children of billionaire founder Zygmunt Solorz had written to the managers of the group, voicing concern over potential attempts to take over the firm.

Bloomberg reports that the billionaire responded by threatening to dismiss the children from his companies as their employment hasn’t led to improving their stability.

“I have recently realized that involving my children in the management of companies at this stage contributes neither to a greater stability in the companies nor to building their better future,” Solorz said in the statement which was sent to all of his employees.

Solorz is estimated to have a net worth of $2.4 billion by Forbes. 

He was born south of Warsaw in 1956 and, in his early 20s, he escaped the country to Germany, where he founded a transport company. 

He founded Polsat in 1992, one of the first national commercial broadcasters in Eastern Europe, as communism collapsed. It remains one of Poland's largest television stations. To it, he has also added the pay-TV platform Cyfrowy Polsat as well as other television channels in the Baltics.

The difficulties with the company appear to stem from a dispute between Solorz’s children and his fourth wife Justyna Kulka, who is on the board of Cyfrowy. The couple married in Lichtenstein in March of this year. Solorz’s son Tobias was the chief executive officer of Cyfrowy between 2015 and 2019, while his brother Piotr Zak was appointed chief executive of Polsat TV this year though tabloids in Poland say that he has already been dismissed. 

Petter Olsen to sell Munch collection

Petter Olsen, the younger brother of shipping magnate Fred Olsen, has been declared bankrupt and is auctioning his collection of paintings by expressionist master Edvard Munch – one of the largest collections in the country. 

Details of the sale have not yet been made public. 

With a net worth once estimated at around $428 million, Olsen currently owes creditors $75 million, according to Bloomberg. 

His repeated issues with the tax office go back several years. In December 2022, he lost a fight over tax related to his hotel, museum and restaurant facilities in Vestby and last year had a number of assets seized by the financial authorities in Norway. 

After the death of his father Thomas Olsen in 1969, Fred Olsen took control over most of the businesses in the family empire which are mostly shipping and logistics companies as well as the watch manufacturer Timex, while Petter gained control over the art, including many Edvard Munchs. Olsen’s father was a close friend of the painter who died in 1944.

The two Olsen brothers ended up in court in 2001 after Fred sued Petter for half of the 34 Munch paintings he owns. Fred lost the case. 

Petter used to own one of the four versions of Munch’s The Scream, which he sold in 2012 for $119.9 million to build a museum to house the rest of his paintings. At the time, it was the highest sum paid for a work sold at auction. 

“A universal symbol of anxiety, The Scream is almost as famous as the Mona Lisa,” is how the painting was described after the sale. 

It is not clear how much the auction might raise, but estimates start at $105 million.