A Modelling Agency and a Bahamian Holding Company
Carrie Perrodo’s name is still on a modelling agency she sold years ago. The company that holds the bulk of her family’s fortune is registered in the Bahamas and does not publish earnings.
Both facts come from the public record, and together they explain the shape of the woman better than any net worth figure will. Forbes has her as a native of Singapore who was a top model in the 1970s, when she met Hubert Perrodo, then travelling the world in search of oil and gas. She launched Carrie’s Models. The agency remains active, under her name, without her.
In 2006 Hubert died in a climbing accident. Carrie and their three children, François, Bertrand and Nathalie, inherited Perenco, the private oil group he built. Forbes now ranks the family fortune at about $11.4bn, eighth in France. Bloomberg’s index puts it lower, at $8.7bn. Neither index gets to see the Bahamian holding company’s books, which is rather the point of a Bahamian holding company.
Fields the Majors Had Finished With
The Perenco method has never been complicated, only unfashionable. Hubert bought mature oil fields the international majors had stopped wanting, ran them cheaply, and ran them for longer than the sellers thought worthwhile. Billionaires.Africa, summarising the family’s history, describes this as the approach that made the company one of the largest independent producers in Africa and the dominant private operator in several of the countries where it works.
Accounts of the founding differ. Billionaires.Africa dates Perenco to 1975. A company-history summary puts the formal establishment at 1992, with barge rentals from 1975, a drilling-services business called Techfor, and a first major offshore field bought from Amoco in Gabon in 1992. Hubert, born in 1944 to a Breton fisherman, appears in every version.
What survived him was a habit of buying what the market had written off, cheaply, and being patient with it. His widow and children now apply it to buildings.
Three Heirs, Three Vehicles
François, the eldest, was born in Singapore on 14 February 1977 and chairs Perenco, which operates in 14 countries. He is also a racing driver and car collector, which is the part of the family that people outside oil have heard of. Nathalie Samani, 42 at the time of Bloomberg’s January 2025 report, oversees the family’s winery investments in Bordeaux. Bertrand, then 40, co-founded Kronos, a Luxembourg property developer, a decade before that report.
Bloomberg reported in January 2025 that the family was pushing capital into high-end real estate, diamonds and clothing as it moved away from hydrocarbons, with bets ranging from a $21m office and apartment block in New York’s SoHo to packaged Italian food and upmarket property in Spain. Three vehicles do the work: BNF Capital, the London family office; Perwyn Advisors, a private equity firm; and Kronos.
Diamonds and clothing are not a portfolio. They are a temperament. So, for that matter, is a Bordeaux vineyard run by the daughter while the son runs the wells.
£100 Million on Savile Row, Reportedly
On 2 September 2026, Bloomberg’s billionaires coverage carried a story headlined “Billionaire French Oil Heirs to Buy London Savile Row Property”. The following day, Billionaires.Africa filled in the terms: the family has reportedly agreed terms to buy 27 Savile Row for about £100m, roughly $135m, with BNF Capital buying alongside Morgan Real Estate from CPI Property Group. The discussions were first reported by Green Street News. Spokespeople for BNF Capital, Morgan Real Estate and CPI Property Group all declined to comment, and the sources describing the deal did so on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are private.
Nothing has been announced as completed. The reporting says terms agreed, and that is where it stops.
The pairing is not new. According to Billionaires.Africa, BNF Capital and Morgan Real Estate have bought together before, including the family’s own Mayfair headquarters at Hanover Square and at least three other London assets. The seller is controlled by the Czech billionaire Radovan Vitek; the same report states flatly that the seller needs the money, a claim that rests on a single source and no comment from CPI.
Billionaires.Africa also does the arithmetic nobody in Mayfair says out loud, noting that the money came from Gabon, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That is a description of where a private oil company operates, and of how a London freehold gets paid for. Property people call this an off-market Mayfair trade. It is also a barrel of Gabonese crude, converted.
£734 Million in Dividends and Four Different Net Worths
The Perrodos have a documented capacity to write cheques of this size out of operating cash. A Perenco UK filing reported in October 2023 showed the company paid the family a total of £734m, about $892m, in dividends between the start of 2022 and June 2023. The same reporting noted the energy producer’s comprehensive income rose 72% to £547m, and that the only other payout in Perenco UK’s financial reports going back to 2014 was £100m in 2019.
Which is to say: the reported Savile Row price is roughly one seventh of a single UK dividend run, and precisely the size of the dividend the family took in a quiet year.
The fortune itself resists a single number. Forbes says about $11.4bn. Bloomberg says $8.7bn. French estimates have run to €9.5bn, and Challenges ranked the family 15th in the country in 2022. The family holds assets through companies registered in Luxembourg, the Bahamas and Guernsey. Estimating a private oil fortune is a genre of fiction with a house style.
A Referral to the 34th Chamber
The family’s core business is heading for a Paris courtroom. Friends of the Earth France and Sherpa sued Perenco S.A. before the Paris judicial tribunal on 9 November 2022, the same day Disclose and Investigate Europe published an investigation alleging environmental harm at the Muanda site in the DRC and documenting 167 incidences of pollution over 15 years. According to Billionaires.Africa, a case management hearing last October confirmed the referral to the tribunal’s 34th chamber, which handles corporate liability in social and environmental matters. No hearing date has been set. The trial is expected in late 2026 or early 2027, and would be the first case establishing a French company’s liability for ecological damage occurring abroad.
Perenco firmly contests all the allegations, which it considers inadmissible and, in any event, ill-founded. Its central jurisdictional argument is that it cannot be held responsible in France for the conduct of Perenco REP, its Congolese subsidiary. No verdict has been reached.
Mongabay reported in July 2026 that residents of Kitombe, in south-western DRC, accuse the group of causing severe air and soil pollution, reporting respiratory problems, dizziness, diarrhoea and crop failures after a gas release from a crude oil storage facility in April 2025; the same reporting describes residents blocking access roads to Perenco facilities on 6 and 7 May 2026, temporarily disrupting operations. Separately, Africa Intelligence reported that Perenco’s Paris headquarters and the homes of several executives and managers were searched in June 2026 as part of a French financial prosecutor’s investigation opened in 2023. No conviction has been announced.
West End Central, Opened 1940
The building at the centre of all this is not, yet, a building anyone would photograph. The site comprises the former West End Central Police Station, which opened in 1940 and later became offices. In June 2026, Green Street News ran a headline describing a “£250m Savile Row police station revamp” tempting investors, a figure that appears to relate to the scheme rather than the reported £100m acquisition. No available source reconciles the two.
Planning documents for 27 Savile Row describe an office-led development in W1: two basement levels, a lower ground floor, a ground floor, seven upper storeys and a rooftop level. The Row that dressed Churchill and Jagger will get another eight floors of lettable space, financed by mature fields in three African countries and negotiated by people who declined to comment.
The police station opened in 1940. The plans call for demolition.
