A Racing Licence and a Bahamas Holding Company
François Perrodo races cars under his own name, which makes him the loudest member of a family whose principal holding company does not publish its earnings.
He is 48, according to reporting from October 2025, born in Singapore on 14 February 1977, chairman of Perenco, and a car collector besides. He also runs the family’s diversification, the money that is being walked out of hydrocarbons and into things you can stand in front of. That work goes through BNF Capital, the family’s London office, and Perwyn Advisors, its private equity arm.
The counting houses disagree about how much there is. Forbes puts the family fortune at about $11.4 billion and ranks the Perrodos eighth in France. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index has had them at $8.7 billion. French estimates have run to €9.5 billion, and Challenges placed them 15th in the country in 2022. A spread of nearly three billion dollars between reputable lists is not sloppiness. It is the price the outside world pays for a structure that keeps its books closed: the holding company controlling the UK operations, and forming the bulk of the fortune, is based in the Bahamas and does not publish earnings.
Mature Wells Nobody Else Wanted
Hubert Perrodo was born on 25 January 1944 in Larmor-Baden, in Brittany, into a family of fishermen. He left for Singapore in 1971, worked in oil for Forex and Comex, and started on his own account in 1975, the year Perenco began.
The method was unglamorous and it never changed. He bought mature fields the international majors had stopped wanting, ran them cheaply, and kept them producing for longer than the sellers thought worthwhile. Everyone else was chasing the next discovery. He was buying the last one, at a discount, from people relieved to be rid of it.
That business now produces roughly 500,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day across 14 countries, with about 6,000 employees. Hubert did not live to see the scale of it. He died in a hiking accident in the French Alps in 2006, and the fortune passed to his widow and three children.
Carrie’s Models, Then Perenco
Carrie Perrodo, born Ka Yee Wong, is a native of Singapore. She was a top model in the 1970s when she met Hubert, and later launched her own agency, Carrie’s Models. In 2006 she inherited an oil company. She was 74 as of the October 2025 reporting, and she lives in London.
The house style since then has been silence. Crain Currency put it plainly: the Perrodo clan has long sought to keep the extent of its wealth, mostly derived from Perenco, out of the public eye. There is no foundation gala circuit, no authorised history, no obliging quote from a family spokesman. When Bloomberg came calling on the Savile Row story, spokespeople for all three companies involved declined to comment.
You can see the shape of the money only where the law requires a filing. Perenco’s UK unit paid the family a total of £734 million, about $892 million, between the beginning of 2022 and June 2023, as the energy producer reported a 72 per cent rise in comprehensive income to £547 million. For the three years through 2024, per Crain Currency, the UK dividends came to £844 million, or $1.1 billion. That is the visible edge of it. The Bahamian parent says nothing.
Three Vehicles and Three Children
In January 2025, Bloomberg reported that the family was pushing capital into high-end real estate, diamonds and clothing as it moved away from hydrocarbons, running the money through three vehicles: BNF Capital in London, Perwyn Advisors, and Kronos, a Luxembourg property developer that Bertrand Perrodo co-founded a decade ago. Bertrand was 41 as of last October. Their sister, Nathalie Perrodo-Samani, 43, oversees the family’s winery investments in Bordeaux.
The purchases in that Bloomberg account read like a portfolio assembled by people with no interest in a theme: a $21 million office and apartment block in New York’s SoHo, packaged Italian food, upmarket property in Spain. Oil dividends arrive in quantities that are difficult to spend narrowly.
Then, in October 2025, Bloomberg reported the family office was exploring new residential deals in the United States, with a BNF Capital team sent to Brooklyn and Austin to study housing demand. The existing UK portfolio, the same report noted, is primarily office buildings. America was framed as the place with the big opportunities.
£100m for the West End Central Police Station
On or around 3 September 2026, Bloomberg ran the headline “Billionaire French Oil Heirs to Buy London Savile Row Property” on its Europe and Money front pages. Green Street News had the discussions first.
The reporting, as republished by Billionaires.Africa, has BNF Capital agreeing terms to buy 27 Savile Row for about £100 million, roughly $135 million, alongside Morgan Real Estate, from CPI Property Group. The sources were people familiar with the talks who asked not to be named because the negotiations are private. Terms agreed is not the same as contracts exchanged, and nobody involved has confirmed anything on the record. Billionaires.Africa’s account also traces the money’s origin to Gabon, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, an attribution that rests on that single write-up.
The building itself is the detail worth carrying to dinner. Twenty-seven Savile Row is nine storeys, and before it was offices it was London’s West End Central Police Station. CPI Property Group acquired it from the mayor of London in April 2021 for around £50 million, as a development opportunity for a scheme with a gross development value of between £150 million and £200 million. Five years later, per the reporting, it is changing hands at roughly double what CPI paid. The buyers intend to redevelop it.
Savile Row sells suits to men who do not want to be looked at twice. The Perrodos will fit in.
Radovan Vitek’s Disposal List
CPI Property Group is controlled by the Czech billionaire Radovan Vitek, and it has been selling buildings since S&P Global Ratings cut its debt to junk in 2024. A further downgrade, to BB, followed earlier this year.
Which explains the timing rather neatly. A family that made its fortune buying assets from sellers who had run out of patience is now buying a Mayfair development site from a group under pressure to raise cash. Hubert Perrodo bought tired wells from majors who wanted them off the books. His son’s office is, per the reports, buying a police station from a landlord working through a disposal programme. The instinct travels well across asset classes.
A Repeatable Structure in Mayfair
BNF Capital and Morgan Real Estate have done this before. They bought the family’s own Mayfair headquarters at Hanover Square together, and at least three other London assets besides. The split on Savile Row has not been disclosed.
That is the machine, and it is a modest one for the size of the fortune behind it: a London office, a partner it already trusts, a preference for buildings with planning upside, and a rule against saying anything to anyone. No trophy tower, no naming rights, no announcement. Just another freehold, a few hundred metres from the desk where the decision was taken.
The building spent its last useful life as a police station. What replaces it, the reports do not say, and the buyers are not answering the phone.
