How one French billionaire built an African empire

Buried Signals | 27 July 2025

How one French billionaire built an African empire

A French billionaire controls 400,000 hectares across Africa through a web of Swiss companies and colonial-era land titles. This is how modern extraction works.

I traced palm oil from European shell companies to a village in Cameroon where 3,000 people live trapped by plantations on their own ancestral land. What I found was a system designed to deflect accountability at every level.

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