Join Us 
Bernard Arnault, chief executive of global luxury group LVMH, has apparently ordered senior managers at the company to “refrain from talking” to seven news outlets-which include Mediapart, Le Canard Enchaîné and La Lettre-whose statements were published on Wednesday in an email allegedly from the French billionaire.
LVMH declined to comment when contacted by the AFP agency.
Our group is the object of prime interest for the media,” Arnault wrote in the introduction of an e-mail whose subject was “Recommendations,” dated January 17 and sent to 16 people, most of whom sit on LVMH’s executive committee. They include his daughter Delphine Arnault, CEO of Christian Dior Couture, Chantal Gaemperle, head of HR at LVMH, Jean-Jacques Guiony, CFO of LVMH, and Pietro Beccari, CEO of Louis Vuitton.
In the letter quoted word for word by La Lettre, Arnault added: “news outlets are also looking for ‘confidential’ information from internal sources outside the communication channels that we have set up, while so-called investigative sites are keen to publish, mostly with a negative bias, allegedly confidential letters, exploiting the public’s interest in the luxury industry to attract new readers with eye-catching headlines.”.
Arnold has officially condemned “any behavior consisting in maintaining relations with unscrupulous journalists, feeding them information and comments on the group’s activities.”.
He also recalled for all the formal prohibition to spread information and comments about the family and warned that he “will be inflexible in the face of any breach of these rules, which would signify for me an intolerable lack of loyalty.”. According to La Lettre, Arnault asked his executives “to transmit these recommendations to the dominant heads of divisions, reminding them that any violation of them (and this will naturally leak out) will be considered serious misconduct in all its implications. According to the same document, Arnault concluded by attaching “a list of publications on which I ask you to observe an absolute ban on talking,” namely La Lettre, Glitz Paris, Miss Tweed, L’Informé, Puck (US), Mediapart, and Le Canard Enchaîné, as well as “any other confidential newsletters and publications of the same type that exist or could be created.
