Wealthy widow's surprise gambit

NAHED Ojjeh is not a name that immediately springs to mind in business circles, though she is a very wealthy woman indeed.

Just why she wants a stake in a near bankrupt ad agency, in the middle of an advertising famine, remains a mystery. She apparently acquired the shares between June 10 and July 4 and in doing so may also have contravened the UK’s takeover rules. These state that acquirers of more than 1% or more of a target company have to be disclosed by midday the day after purchase. "Oops! Sorry," says Ojjeh, claiming ignorance of the rules.

The more generously spirited souls in the City regard her failure to disclose the holding as no more than a minor transgression by a takeover novice. As others suspected more sinister motives, the rumour machine went into overdrive. Madame Ojjeh and Active Value, which owns 28.5% of Cordiant’s shares, must be acting in concert. "Non, non," said the Syrian beauty, fluttering her long black eyelashes. Active Value also denied that it has had any contact with her.

The next titbit was that she’s the latest squeeze of Jean-Marie Messier, the clown of French capitalism who quickly built and more speedily bust the entertainment giant Vivendi Universal. Is she not the one that had an affair with randy Roland Dumas when he was France’s foreign minister, others were whispering.

What is nearer the truth about this intriguing Syrian born, Paris-based chess promoter is that she is a close friend of Maurice Levy, the boss of Publicis, the French ad giant whose bid for Cordiant was seen off by the determined and more fleet-footed Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP.

Ojjeh is also a friend of Elizabeth Badinter, the daughter of the founder of Publicis, who heads the supervisory board. And to add to the coincidences, the effervescent Ojjeh holds a 1% stake in Publicis which has renounced any interest in buying Cordiant after being seen off Sorrell. Under another UK takeover rule, that effectively rules Publicis out from counter-bidding again for six months.

Whatever Mrs O’s interest in Cordiant is, it cannot be for the money.

So can the queen of chess out-move the English knight? That looks unlikely, though the tortured moves in the takeover of Cordiant are enough to baffle any grandmaster. Publicis, however, retains a serious financial interest in the future of Cordiant which owns an option to sell its 25% stake in media buyer Zenith Optimedia to the French company for 75m. Sorrell will probably make that gambit if he acquires executive control of the company. Also Cordiant’s white knight has a pretty conclusive move he could make in the game which would checkmate all other shareholders - including Mrs O. His WPP has the power to place the company into administration because of the debt it is owed.

But back to the tawny-haired temptress of the royal game. She swept into the chess scene in 2001 when taking control of the high-class but crumbling Parisian chess club, Caissa. After relaunching the club as NAO - her initials - she made her mark on the nerdy world of big purses, towering egos and bitter infighting by establishing a new world series chess championship.

Suddenly, there was a renaissance in the fortunes of the club. It moved premises out of the Pigalle red light district of Paris to upmarket Avenue Foch. Ojjeh endowed the club with a handsome budget and NAO went out recruiting a dream team of players, including Boris Spassky. Her ambition is for the Paris club to recapture for France the heady days of the early 1990s when the Auxerre team could afford to have the world champion, Garry Kasparov, on its roster.

As part of Ojjeh’s ambitions, there was a plan to stage the grandly named Reunification World Chess Championship Match, which would combine the FIDE chess federation with the Einstein World Chess Champion, sponsored by the London-based Einstein Group. But Ojjeh and Einstein parted company earlier this year after an acrimonious row. The Paris chess club alleged that the Einstein group failed to meet its engagements over a chess tournament in Dortmund last July. The Einstein group denied the allegations. Ojjeh funded the Dortmund purse with 300,000 of prize money.

The chess club allows Ojjeh to pursue her philanthropic activities, particularly to encourage children to discover the supreme intellectual delight of executing a Capablanca move, or dreaming of becoming the next Bobby Fischer.

Ojjeh donned widow’s weeds in 1991, when her Syrian husband, arms dealer Akram Ojjeh passed away. In 1999 she sold off her late husband’s breathtaking collection of 19th-century French paintings and furniture at auction in London, New York and Monaco.

Money is no object for the benefactress. She holds a footnote in French literary largesse. Thanks to her personal contribution, the Bibliothque Nationale de France, the French equivalent of the British National Library, was able to snap up in auction in 2001 the signed manuscript of Celine’s masterpiece, Voyage to the End of Night, for 1,857,444. It was France’s most expensive literary acquisition, with the previous record held by the purchase of Kafka’s The Trial in 1988.

Ojjeh’s patronage of the arts extends to the Acadmie des Beaux Arts, the institute for fine arts, where she holds the title of Corresponding Member, and where she has endowed a prize for young artists, named Prix Nahed Ojjeh. The patrons of the Academie are a roll call of the great and good, including Michel David-Weill, of Lazards Bank, and Sir Peter Ustinov, the polyglot actor and raconteur.

The record of Ojjeh’s gifts includes some rather controversial choices, including the bequest of a medical scanner and related equipment worth Ff8m to a hospital in Dordogne, the sunlit province so beloved by the British. That gift nearly unseated Roland Dumas, French foreign minister at the time who was fighting for his local re-election.

On the face of it there was nothing remarkable in this generous benefactor’s gift except that the hospital in question was in Sarlat, in the parliamentary constituency of Dumas, who was said to be a very close friend of the stylish widow with the open cheque book.

Her friendship with the former foreign minister nearly cost Dumas his seat in the parliamentary elections in March. The hospital gift was donated by a Syrian foundation created by Ojjeh. When revealed it created a sensation in the French press. Quotidien de Paris said it "raised questions about the foreign minister’s privileged relations with the family of Mustafa Tlas", Mrs O’s late husband.

Friends describe Ojjeh as funny, intelligent and chatty, who brings a breath of fresh air into the stuffy world of French politics. But the unromantically inclined French secret service was allegedly concerned enough about the friendship between minister Dumas and the attractive widow that a quiet word of caution was whispered into his socialist ear.

There yet may be an official inquiry by the British Financial Services Authority into Ojjeh’s share purchases of Cordiant. The UK Takeover Panel could also stop the clock and rule foul play by temporarily stopping Ojjeh from voting her shares.

But in the Machiavellian world of company takeovers, it’s always the biggest cheque that wins the game at the end of the day.