Joseph Oughourlian

Oughourlian was born in Paris on February 15, 1972. He is the son of the neuropsychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian and the grandson of Mr. Oughourlian who was, from 1962 to 1983, first vice-governor of the Banque du Liban (Central Bank of Lebanon) and a survivor of the Armenian genocide.[6] His mother, a nurse, is English.[7]

He attended secondary school at Sainte-Croix de Neuilly, where he obtained his baccalaureate in 1989. He graduated from the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris (HEC Paris) and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po),.[7][8] He also obtained a master's degree in economics at the Sorbonne.[9]

He began his career in cooperation at Société Générale in 1994.[7]

He moved to New York in 1996 where, the following year, he began to manage funds directly, again for Société Générale.[10] This is how he comes to create in October 2001the first Amber fund, by split,[10] using seed capital from the bank.[11] He then headed a fund with more than six billion in assets.[10]

In 2005, he founded the activist investment fund Amber Capital in New York, but three years later the crisis undermined his clientele and the assets he managed.[10] In 2012, he relocated the management company to London due to numerous investments in Europe, but also with offices in Milan;[10] Oughourlian invests a lot in Italy (in around twenty different companies).[6]

In December 2015, he was appointed to the board of directors of the Spanish press group Prisa.[12] April 29, 2019, he was appointed vice-president, being the main shareholder through the company Amber Capital then chairman of the board of directors in February 2021.[13] Once his actions in the Lagardère group were completed in France, he invested more particularly in its affairs in Madrid; in 2021 it owns almost a third of the Prisa group while Vivendi, which became a partner following the raid on Lagardère, owns almost a tenth of the shares.

As of March 1, 2020 (i.e. after the stock market crash of 2020), Amber Capital manages 1.1 billion euros in assets.[7]

Via Amber Capital, Mr. Oughourlian invests in companies that he considers to be badly managed and whose management he seeks to influence (activist shareholder).[7] However, he defines himself as an “active manager” and refutes the qualification of activist.[10]

In 2014, he obtained the departure of Frédéric Vincent from his position as CEO of Nexans.[7] In 2015, he became the first shareholder of Prisa, then forced it to restructure and sell its stake in Le Monde. In 2016, he took a stake in Gameloft and raised the stakes between Vivendi and Ubisoft before allowing Vivendi to win.[7] It also encourages Total to raise its offer for Saft.[6]

In 2017, he led Solocal to restructure its debt and pushed Lactalis to raise its offer for Parmalat.[6] Two years later, he asked Suez to rethink its strategy and sell its Spanish subsidiary Agbar.

In 2020, he was personally at the origin of a high-profile campaign to oust Arnaud Lagardère, whom he accuses of poor management, from his group,[6][14][15] by demanding the revocation of Lagardère's supervisory board.[16][17] This battle of shareholders also became a battle of people, between the i nterested party and Arnaud Lagardère[18]  and lasted four years.