Mon, Oct 17th 2022
The Aponte family – an Italian-Swiss family that owns the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) in Geneva – was recently crowned the richest family in Switzerland thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and western buying habits. But the notoriously secretive family has also come under fire for how they may have obtained their success: making friends with politicians and turning a blind eye to shipping some nefarious items.
Gianluigi Aponte (center), and his children Diego (left) and Alexa (right) in a photo from 2019.
The head of the family
Born near Sorrento in 1940, Gianluigi Aponte grew up working on boats and eventually became a naval officer at 20. That same year, Aponte met Rafaela, daughter of an Israeli businessman who had moved his family to Geneva. Gianluigi and Rafaela married and Aponte got a job at the International Credit Bank in Geneva.
But Gianluigi dreamed of running a shipping company – something his father had started before his untimely passing when Aponte was just five years old – so, he left the Swiss banking world. In 1970, Frenchman Dominique Denat, loaned Aponte $200,000 to buy his first ship, the Patricia, and MCS was born.
Today, MCS has the largest fleet of container ships in the world at 700. The MCS group also owns ferry lines, cruise lines, cargo planes, real estate all over Switzerland, and dozens of port terminals around the world. Although more than 150,000 employees work for MCS, all the power is in the hands of Gianluigi, his wife Rafaela, their adult children Diego and Alexa, and their respective spouses.
“It’s all family. On the board of directors, Gianluigi Aponte alone represents the share capital,” MCS director for more than 40 years Pierre Du Pasquier told Swiss newspaper 24 heures. The Aponte family is famously tight-lipped; they have never confirmed their wealth and have declined to give any interviews to media outlets. Moreover, MCS is the only major shipping company to have never published financial figures and it is not even listed on the stock exchange.
The price of shipping by frigate increased six-fold during the pandemic.
The pandemic hits
American shipping expert John McCown estimates the company made $26.6 billion in profits between June 2021 and June 2022.
“MSC earns as much as three-quarters of Facebook” McCown told 24 Heures, meaning that the family now has about $100 billion net worth. This places the family just below Bill Gates (fifth richest person in the world) and above Warren Buffet, according to Forbes’ billionaire ranking. Before the pandemic, the Aponte family did not crack the list of the top 100 wealthiest people in the world and now they likely rank among the top 10. How did this happen?
While many economists predicted that global trade would collapse during the 2020 Covid pandemic, homebound Americans went on an online spending spree – making shipping one of the most in-demand industries at the time. The explosion in demand – coming mostly from the U.S. for products made in Asia – peaked in 2021 as bored Americans bought laptops, Pelotons, furniture and clothes.
The congestion in supply chains caused shipping prices to soar. A container that once cost $2,700 to ship now cost $15,000 or more. Essentially, costs multiplied sixfold during a 12-month period. The Aponte family “made more money than in the entire previous decade” during the pandemic, an MCS spokesperson told Le Matin Dimanche.
Even U.S. President Joe Biden called out MCS for raising their prices by 1000 percent to the detriment of “American families and businesses.”
And while shipping prices are now declining, they still remain about three times higher than they were in 2019, according to shipping experts from maritime research firm Drewry. The prices remain that way because MCS has global influence at this point. The family decides on “the price, the availability, the deadline,” a former MCS employee told Le Matin, adding “Today, they feel untouchable.”
Alexis Kohler (left) now serves as the right-hand man to the French President Macron, but he used to work for MCS (Credit: BBC).
Friends in high places
Last year – at the height of MCS’s pandemic earnings – it came to light how the Aponte family cultivated a friendship with Alexis Kohler, who has served as the secretary general to France and the right-hand man to French President Emmanuel Marcon since 2017.
Kohler began working at the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance and slowly climbed his way up to become director of Macron’s cabinet in 2014. When Macron resigned from that position in 2016 to begin working on his presidential campaign, Kohler became the financial director of MSC Cruises in Geneva, earning nearly CHF 500,000 per year – more than most senior directors at MCS.
During this time, Kohler was allowed to take a half day or day off each week to work on Macron’s presidential campaign. During the same period, Kohler, his wife, and three children went on eight vacations on Aponte family yachts, as well as staying at their ski chalet in Megève. It was also during this time that Kohler was privy to sensitive information regarding MCS’s contract with the French shipyards of Saint-Nazaire.
MCS has spent more than 20 billion euros building cruise ships in Saint-Nazaire, according to Mer et Marine. It has been a symbiotic relationship: MCS funnels business into the shipyards, and about 80 percent of the construction was financed by bank loans from the French government, according to Mediapart.
In 2021, French anti-corruption investigators from Anticor searched the MCS offices in Geneva on suspicion of “successive conflicts of interest” between Kohler and MCS. Kohler, his family, and the Aponte family say they have never discussed the Saint-Nazaire shipyards or financing MCS cruise ships, but just two weeks ago the French government served Kohler a conflict-of-interest lawsuit.
Luckily for Kohler, the offense does not exist under Swiss law, so he is presumed innocent here. But in France, Kohler may still face a trial.
MCS has a fleet of more than 700 ships like the one pictured above.
Illegal shipments
In 2019, a MCS ship traveling from Brazil to Europe ran aground in American waters. U.S. authorities discovered about 20 tons of cocaine hidden on board. MCS had to pay $50 million for the U.S. to release the ship. The discovery gave credence to the widely-held belief that Brazil was funding Antwerp’s European drug market. Since then, Belgian port authorities have tightened security by adding thermal cameras to their ports.
Then at the end of 2021, authorities at a Yemen port discovered another 200 kilos of drugs aboard an MCS ship coming from South America. In January of 2022, MCS announced they would halt all South American shipments until further notice.
MCS only finally cracked down because drug cartels made threats against the company, its customers, and business partners, according to Belgian state media outlet RTBF.
Green Party politician Fabienne Fischer praised MCS’s commitment to sustainability, but the CO2 emissions tell a different story.
Muddy waters
In May of this year, Geneva State Councilor Fabienne Fischer toured a medium-sized MSC freighter, named Vigo, in the Hamburg port. A few days later the Green party politician praised MSC for its commitment to sustainability and applauded the company’s work to “find alternatives to fossil fuels” as quickly as possible.
But in 2019 alone, MCS Vigo emitted nearly 20,000 tons of CO2 each year during its voyages to and from Europe – about equal to 10,000 cars. And if you look at MCS’s entire fleet, they emitted about 34 million tons of pollution all over the world in 2021 – equal to the emissions of the entire country of Switzerland, according to the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment.
That said, the ship can carry as many goods as about 14,000 trucks and pollute less over time; but it may be a stretch to say that “MCS operates with a modern, green fleet,” like what the company said in 2019 on its website. The Apontes have created a foundation to “protect and cherish the planet,” focused on restoring coral in the Bahamas and supporting the coastal ecosystems in Germany. Environmentalists are quick to point out that these actions are easily surpassed by the fact that MCS increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent between 2020 and 2021.
Suffice to say, MCS is not on track to meet the climate commitment it made in 2015 to reduce emissions to 23 million tons of CO2 by 2025, according to the Carbon Disclosure Project. To reach that goal, MCS would have to cut its emissions by one-third over the next three years.
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