Hubert Perrodo bought an offshore field Amoco no longer wanted, and three decades later Forbes and Bloomberg sit $2.7 billion apart on what his widow and three children are worth.
Perenco buys oil fields that bigger companies have finished with, and the family behind it has turned other people’s leftovers into a fortune that nobody can price with any confidence. The Perrodos publish no group accounts. When Forbes first ranked them in 2014, according to Forbes, they declined both the interview and the fact-check. The eight numbers below are the published estimates of the Perrodo family net worth, each tied to the outlet that produced it, together with the company figures Perenco and its regulators have released. Every fortune figure is a family-level estimate. No outlet has published what any single Perrodo owns.
Forbes puts the Perrodo family net worth at about $11.4 billion, eighth in France
Forbes files the fortune under one name, “Carrie Perrodo & family”, and that name belongs to the widow. Forbes describes Carrie Wong Perrodo as a native of Singapore and a former model who started a modelling agency in the 1970s. She met Hubert Perrodo early in that decade, while he was travelling the world drilling for oil and gas, and according to Forbes she inherited Perenco when he died in 2006. Billionaires.Africa reported in July 2026 that Forbes puts the family at about $11.4 billion, eighth in France. Forbes’ profile of Carrie Perrodo and family was last updated on 10 March 2026. This is the highest current estimate from a major outlet. The name on the list is a filing convenience for Forbes and tells you nothing about who holds which shares.
Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index has the family at $8.7 billion
Bloomberg is more cautious. Its index figure of $8.7 billion is cited by Billionaires.Africa, and Bloomberg’s January 2025 report on the family’s investments described them as worth more than $8 billion. The same report is the source for most of what is known about the children as people. Bloomberg calls François Perrodo, the chairman, an avid racing driver, and Billionaires.Africa says he read physics at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and captained the university polo team in 1999. The $2.7 billion gap between Forbes and Bloomberg would get a family onto either list on its own.
The French €9.5 billion and the EIA’s US$9.5 billion are two different estimates
Two of the Perrodo figures share the same digits and nothing else. Billionaires.Africa says French estimates of the fortune have run as high as €9.5 billion, without naming the publication, and that Challenges ranked the family 15th in France in 2022. Separately, the Environmental Investigation Agency, an American campaign group, gave a figure of US$9.5 billion in a March 2025 report critical of Perenco, without saying who had done the estimating. One figure is in euros and the other is in dollars. They come from different sources, and any page that treats them as one figure has merged an unnamed French estimate with an NGO’s figure without saying so.
Forbes valued the Perrodos at $10 billion in 2014 and $4.2 billion in 2016
The family’s first appearance on a global list came in February 2014. Christopher Helman’s Forbes piece put the fortune at “at least $10 billion”, and noted that French media had previously listed it at €2.8 billion. Forbes built that figure on Perenco’s revenue, which it reported as $5.9 billion in 2012, up from $3.5 billion in 2010. The family, invited to correct the arithmetic, said nothing. Two years later Forbes’ oil-and-energy list put the fortune at $4.2 billion, based on estimated 2015 revenue of $2.3 billion. Anyone quoting a single Perrodo number as settled should look at those two years first.
Perenco’s business began with one offshore field bought from Amoco in Gabon
Hubert Perrodo came, according to Forbes, from the fishing towns of Brittany and served in the French navy as a young man. In 1981 he founded a drilling company, Techfor, and in 1992 he sold it to concentrate on buying oil and gas interests outright. Perenco’s own account says his first offshore field was bought from Amoco in Gabon, and that this deal created the model the group still follows: take over mature fields that the majors consider marginal and keep them producing. Perenco dates that vision to 1992, although some secondary accounts give an earlier founding year. The deals grew larger. Forbes lists ConocoPhillips’ Vietnam assets at $1.29 billion, BP fields in the North Sea at $400 million and Petrobras’ Colombian fields at $380 million. Hubert was also, according to Forbes, a polo player and wine lover who bought Bordeaux vineyards including Château Labegorce. He kept his money in the ground and his pleasures above it.
Hubert Perrodo’s widow and three children own the whole of Perenco, according to Forbes
Hubert Perrodo died in 2006 in an Alpine climbing accident, and Perenco says his eldest son, François, took over that year. François was born in Singapore in 1977. Forbes reported in 2014 that legal documents showed the entire group was fully owned and controlled by Hubert’s heirs: his widow and their three children, François, Nathalie and Bertrand, all French nationals. Forbes also said then that the estate had not yet been divided. How it was divided, if it has been, has never been made public, and no outlet has published the split between mother and children. According to Billionaires.Africa, the family holds its assets through companies registered in Luxembourg, the Bahamas and Guernsey. Forbes says the family operates out of London. Perenco calls itself, with some understatement, a growing family business.
Perenco pumps more than 510,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day across 14 countries
The company has grown well beyond the Gabon field. In February 2024 Perenco gave its gross production as more than 510,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day and its workforce as 7,470, and its own corporate copy lists operations in 14 countries across Central Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia and Europe. The family chairs the company and hires professionals to run it day to day. In 2024 François Perrodo moved Benoît de la Fouchardière from chief executive to the group board and to the leadership of Dixstone, the services affiliate, and appointed Armel Simondin, a Total alumnus who joined Perenco in 2011, as CEO from 15 March 2024. “It has been a long journey since 2016 when I appointed Benoît as CEO,” the chairman said in the group’s appointment announcement. Perenco’s reach also appears in other companies’ filings. Golar LNG’s quarterly report to the SEC names Naria Inc., which it describes as Perenco-affiliated, as its largest shareholder with 10.10% at 31 March 2026, and records $61.9 million in net revenues from Perenco in the first quarter of 2026. The filing does not say who owns Naria. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the African Energy Chamber says Perenco is the only producing oil operator, the company is due before a Paris tribunal over alleged pollution, according to Disclose. Perenco contests the allegations as inadmissible and ill-founded. The defendant is the company, and no member of the family has been named.
Perenco UK paid £734 million in dividends in eighteen months
This is the only point at which money can be seen leaving the business. A Perenco UK filing, reported in October 2023, showed £734 million (about $892 million) paid in dividends between the start of 2022 and June 2023, after comprehensive income rose 72% to £547 million. The only other payout in the subsidiary’s accounts going back to 2014 was £100 million in 2019. That is one subsidiary in one country, so it is not the family’s income, but it gives a sense of the scale. According to Bloomberg’s January 2025 report, as republished by PropTech Connect, the heirs allocate capital partly through a London family office, BNF Capital; a private equity firm, Perwyn Advisors; and Kronos, a Luxembourg property developer that Bertrand Perrodo co-founded. Holdings named in that report include a $21 million office-and-apartment block in SoHo, a packaged Italian food business and upmarket Spanish property, while Forbes says Nathalie oversees the family’s Bordeaux winery investments. According to Bloomberg, Perenco itself has stayed with fossil fuels and expanded into gas and exploration.
So who owns Perenco now? On Forbes’ 2014 reading of the legal documents, it belongs entirely to Carrie Perrodo and her three children, with François as chairman and Armel Simondin running operations. The family has never published how the shares are split between them. Until it does, every Perrodo fortune is a family total, and the totals published so far run from the €2.8 billion French media once listed to Forbes’ current $11.4 billion.
