Exclusive-Judge orders cognitive checks on Hermès heir who says his fortune was stolen, sources say

(Refiles to correct dateline)

By Tassilo Hummel and David Gauthier-Villars

Nov 13 (Reuters) - The Paris judge investigating the missing fortune of Hermès heir Nicolas Puech, who says he was fleeced of his 6% stake in the luxury company, has ordered an assessment of his cognitive abilities, two people with direct knowledge of the decision said.

The order, which has not been previously reported, is the latest development in a protracted corporate and legal saga stretching back a quarter of a century, when luxury group LVMH worked with Puech’s Swiss wealth manager Eric Freymond to covertly amass shares in smaller rival Hermès. 

The judge has ordered a team of psychiatrists to check whether Puech, 83, could be mentally impaired, the two people familiar with the investigation said, adding that any finding showing the heir was vulnerable and taken advantage of could potentially lower the bar for criminal liability in the probe into his missing fortune.

Exploiting a person's reduced mental capacities or other vulnerabilities for undue financial profit is a special criminal offense under French law known as "abuse of weakness", made famous internationally by the case of the late L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

The office of French financial crime prosecutors declined to comment. Spokespersons for Puech and LVMH declined to comment. In a June court filing, LVMH forcefully denied it had ever tried to acquire Puech's shares in Hermès through schemes involving his late wealth manager. Before his death in 2025, Freymond denied any wrongdoing during questioning by Paris prosecutors. 

MISSING SHARES MYSTERY

Last year, Puech named LVMH and its billionaire chairman Bernard Arnault as defendants in a civil lawsuit seeking €14 billion ($15.5 ​billion) in damages from whoever might be found guilty in the parallel criminal investigation into his missing shares. As part of the criminal investigation, prosecutors have focused on Freymond and Swiss lawyer Alexandre Montavon, who advised LVMH on its covert stakebuilding in the 2000s. 

Prosecutors placed Montavon, who denies any wrongdoing, under investigation in May on suspicion of participating in the misappropriation of Puech's Hermès shares for the benefit of LVMH. He has appealed the judge's order to carry out cognitive checks on the heir, the two people familiar with the investigation said.

Neither LVMH nor Arnault has been named a formal suspect, but the investigation has brought intense public scrutiny of what happened to Puech's shares, worth about $9 billion at current market prices.

Reuters reported in September that LVMH eyed Puech’s portfolio of Hermès shares through a pact struck with Freymond in 2002, and paid at least $20 million in commissions and fees to the financier for his services in the Hermès stock build-up.

In the June court filing, LVMH acknowledged working with Freymond to accumulate Hermès shares but said any purchase of Puech’s shares would have been unintentional. LVMH accumulated as much as 23% in Hermès, setting off a fierce corporate feud, before agreeing to liquidate its stake in a 2014 truce.

Puech has said he didn’t discover his shares had vanished until 2022, after he cut ties with his wealth manager. Until then, the heir said he had blind trust in Freymond for decades. “He had all the signatures in my name and prepared all the documents,” Puech told French magazine L’Express in a 2025 interview. 

(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel and David Gauthier-Villars; Editing by Lisa Jucca, Kirsten Donovan)