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Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre, Owner of OceanRe International, while formally charged in Luxembourg for fraud, has never been convicted of a crime. Yet for twenty years, reporters and investigators keep finding him a door away from some of Europe's most brazen money-laundering schemes — first beside a confessed Ponzi schemer in Geneva, then inside the financial machinery of Venezuela's plundered oil billions. This is what the public record actually shows.

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On a Wednesday morning in January 2013, a 39-year-old banker named Fabien Gaglio walked into a Paris police station, sat down in an interrogation room, and calmly explained that he had been lying to his clients for fifteen years. “My job was to make my clients' money grow,” he told the commander, before describing how he had instead taken money from one client to pay another, fabricated statements, and forged signatures. “Je n'ai plus rien,” he said. I have nothing left.

In the days that followed, Bloomberg Businessweek later reported, Gaglio's business partner — “a French count with luxuriant black hair named Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre” — began tearfully relaying the news to the clients of their Geneva firm, Hottinger & Partners. Eleven of them filed complaints in Switzerland. So did the firm itself. The fallout would eventually sink Hottinger & Cie, a Swiss bank whose roots reached back to 1786.

Clermont-Tonnerre has always cast himself on the right side of that story: the partner who was deceived, who sounded the alarm, who spent years helping victims claw money back. Prosecutors in two countries looked at him and, in the end, convicted of nothing.  But the reporting assembled here — from Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, the German business magazine brand eins, and investigative outlets in Switzerland and Venezuela — keeps circling a stubborn question: how does one man end up, twice, so close to so much dirty money?

The house of Hottinger 

Hottinger & Partners was the kind of firm that didn't advertise. Its clients — tech founders, artists, businessmen from Singapore to California — believed they were customers of the venerable Hottinger bank. Technically they were not. They were clients of an asset-management company that merely shared the bank's address and its stationery, signed “Hottinger & Partners S.A.; Member of the Hottinger Group, Bankers since 1786.” Gaglio owned 30 percent of it. So did Clermont-Tonnerre, per brand eins. Bloomberg described the count as the firm's rainmaker, a “modern-day musketeer — tall, suave, and hailing from one of France's best-known aristocratic families,” instrumental in charming the wealthy through Michelin-catered dinner parties and chartered jets.

What the clients didn't know was where their money went. Between 2009 and 2012, nearly €7.3 million vanished from the account of German entrepreneur Michael Kleemann alone; some €80 million disappeared from Hottinger customers overall, according to brand eins. The money bought strange things — a stake in a nuclear fallout shelter that never existed, a rugby-themed sculpture in Wellington, fifteen transfers totalling €2.2 million to the disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder.

When investigators pulled the thread, they found something bigger than a Ponzi scheme. At the center sat a Belize company called Glendale Portfolio Inc., through which — according to forensic investigator Andrea Galli, who analyzed roughly 100,000 pages of case files for the victims — some €250 million to $300 million had churned between 2003 and 2013. Galli concluded that Gaglio had spent his early career not as a failed investor but as “a serial money launderer” washing funds for businessmen, politicians and criminals, and that the tearful Ponzi confession may have been stage-managed to bury that earlier business. Money flowed out of Glendale to roughly a hundred beneficiaries.

And here is where Clermont-Tonnerre's name first stops being incidental. Bank records reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek showed that money leaving Glendale and other Gaglio-controlled entities “ended up in accounts or businesses of Gaglio's partner Clermont-Tonnerre.” brand eins put it more simply: “Also Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre received money from Glendale.”

The family entanglements ran deeper. More than €600,000 of client money, brand eins reported, went to a solar-investment firm on the Côte d'Azur in which Gaglio's wife Fanny held 25 percent of the shares — and Marie-Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, the count's wife, held another 25 percent until 2015. The money passed through a private-equity firm of which Clermont-Tonnerre, together with Gaglio, was a beneficial owner. Bloomberg added another: well before the confession, the two partners had been “putting money into commercial enterprises using corporate structures that effectively obscured their identity,” including an offshore vehicle they jointly owned that lent €3 million to CAP SUD SAS, a French solar company established by their two wives and a rugby-star friend. Asked about any of it, none of those named answered questions.

One of Gaglio's victims, tech entrepreneur Tilman Reissfelder, eventually stopped believing in the lone-wolf story altogether. Five years after the confession, armed with Galli's analysis, he filed fresh lawsuits in Geneva and Milan against Gaglio “and his suspected accomplices” — alleging, in Bloomberg's words, that Hottinger & Partners itself “was a front for money launderers.”

Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre: The man the courts kept clearing

It must be said plainly, because it is the pivot of this entire story: every time the justice system examined Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre, it let him go.

In Luxembourg, where Gaglio had looted some €7.5 million from clients of their affiliate H CTG, fraud charges filed against Clermont-Tonnerre were dropped for lack of evidence. When Gaglio stood trial there in 2016 — he got five years, trimmed to four on appeal — Clermont-Tonnerre appeared not as a defendant but as a civil party, claiming €20,000 in moral damages. The court, in effect, treated him as one of the victims. In Geneva, prosecutors opened an investigation into him; they closed it without charges, and when a former client, Boavista International Ltd., challenged the closure, the appeals chamber upheld it in January 2021, according to the Swiss judicial newsletter Gotham City.

His own account, given through lawyers and a handful of friendly profiles, is coherent: he received the first alarmed client call on January 3, 2013, commissioned Deloitte forensics, filed complaints with Swiss and Luxembourg authorities within days, bought the firm back to wind it down honorably, and recovered millions for clients. His business partner Florence Cane told Bloomberg the payments he had received were simply fees for services provided to Hottinger, with no reason at the time to question their origin. Through his lawyer, he said he was confident he would be cleared. Largely, he was.

Gaglio was not. In March 2022, a Geneva court finally convicted him — of professional fraud, aggravated breach of trust, forgery, and, notably, professional money laundering — for embezzling more than 37 million francs. The judge complained the prosecution had dragged its feet so badly that many charges had expired. Gaglio, who had spent the intervening years in a rented villa near Cannes claiming to be supported by his parents, went back to serve out a sentence that, all told, compares mercifully with Bernie Madoff's 150 years.

A second act, in Venezuelan oil money

If the story ended there, Clermont-Tonnerre would be a footnote in someone else's fraud. It does not end there.

In 2012 — months before Gaglio's confession — a private banker at Banca Privada d'Andorra named Pablo Laplana was working urgently on behalf of a client the investigative blog Infodio would later describe bluntly as a thug: Diego Salazar, first cousin and alleged bagman of Rafael Ramírez, the man who ran Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA for a decade. Salazar wanted two buildings in Paris — 17/19 Avenue Montaigne and 7 Rue du Cirque, worth some €50 million — and he wanted his name nowhere near them.

According to leaked emails published by Infodio in September 2020, Laplana wrote to a Paris lawyer at the firm FTPA asking for two documents before he could release the payments: a letter confirming the purchases — and “a report Jean-François Clermont-Tonnerre sent to you which describes the alternatives to go ahead with the RE investment using a structure based [in] Luxembourg.” The client, Laplana noted, was “sending another transfer, of 50M, to Hottinger & Cie.” Days later the lawyer circulated “the proposed structure for the acquisition of the two buildings that has been prepared by Hottinger,” under the subject line “Cliona.” Copied on the email: Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre.

Infodio is a one-man operation and its documents cannot be independently verified here — an important caveat. But its skeleton checks out elsewhere: Mediapart's Karl Laske, working from separate leaks, confirmed Salazar's offices on Avenue Montaigne and a Luxembourg vehicle called Cliona Holding sitting atop a Panamanian company. Salazar himself was arrested in Caracas in 2017; the money behind him — roughly $2 billion allegedly siphoned from PDVSA through fraudulent insurance contracts and parked at BPA in Andorra — became one of the signature kleptocracy cases of the decade, and remains, remarkably, untried against its Venezuelan defendants to this day.

One of those defendants is a businessman named Luis Mariano Rodriguez Cabello — described by prosecutors as Salazar's operator, and by The Wall Street Journal as something else as well: a “longtime associate” of Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre.

$107.5 million, looking for a home

The numbers here are precise. After an Andorran court froze the Venezuelans' BPA accounts, about $200 million was released — and soon after, per a 2016 U.S. Treasury intelligence report cited by the Journal, Rodriguez and associates moved $107.5 million, in fifteen wire transfers between October 2014 and November 2015, into a corporate account at Morgan Stanley. The Venezuelan outlet Armando.info traced the same fifteen transfers through a Barbados reinsurer called Energy Risk Indemnity SCC — a company operated for Salazar by Rodriguez Cabello, flagged by FinCEN, and onto whose board, in 2017, stepped one Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre. He did not respond to the outlet's questions.

Morgan Stanley grew suspicious of the money and closed the account in 2017. It needed somewhere to go. It went, the Journal reported in September 2021, to Capital Guardian Wealth Management — “an investment adviser partly owned by a French businessman and longtime associate of Mr. Rodriguez, Jean François de Clermont-Tonnerre.” It was Clermont-Tonnerre, according to the Journal's sources and records, who contracted Interactive Brokers, America's largest online brokerage, to manage the account. This was not a firm with a spotless sheet: in 2018, a sister company, Capital Guardian LLC, was expelled from FINRA for refusing to pay a $125,000 fine over what the regulator called suspicious Venezuelan transactions in a separate matter.

Inside the successor firm, Avenir Private Advisors, a compliance officer named Mark Coffey started asking why the Rodriguez account was paying its advisers fees two and three times the market rate. Around the time he began asking, the Journal reported, the owners began liquidating the remaining $70 million. Coffey was gone by 2019; that same year he took his files — statements, emails, texts, corporate records — to the SEC as a whistleblower, alleging a network laundering PDVSA money through American securities firms. By 2021, the FBI, the SEC and other agencies were examining why U.S. firms had handled more than $100 million for a man draped in money-laundering red flags — and probing, specifically, “the role of Capital Guardian, its owners” and Avenir. A curious ownership detail sits in the public record: Avenir's 2019 SEC filing lists among its indirect owners a foreign entity called 1788 Capital Group SA. Clermont-Tonnerre's own foundation biography says he founded a Swiss firm called 1788 Capital in 2013. The names match; and on Clermont-Tonnerre's LinkedIn profile he lists 1788Capital.com as his Company:

Through a spokesman, Clermont-Tonnerre told the Journal he “is not aware that [Mr. Rodriguez] is laundering money,” and that neither he nor his firms had broken any law. Avenir's chief executive said an SEC review found “no issues of substance.” And the aftermath, as of August 2026, favors the deniers, at least formally: no charges against Clermont-Tonnerre, his firms, or Rodriguez Cabello have ever materialized in the United States; the later federal attention drifted toward Morgan Stanley itself. The Andorra case against the Venezuelans has been slowly bleeding out for a decade.

The version he prefers

Search Clermont-Tonnerre's name today and you will mostly find a different man: an “entrepreneur, investor, global business advisor and environmentalist”; the acquirer of AUM Asset Management, one of Malta's larger fund shops; patron, with Marie-Laure, of a biodiversity chair at the Collège de France; conservator of 1,800 acres in British Columbia. None of his websites mention Hottinger, Gaglio, Capital Guardian or Venezuela. Starting about ten months after the Bloomberg exposé, a wave of near-identical flattering profiles — the financier who “hunts down embezzled millions” — washed through pay-friendly Online Reputation Management outlets, one as recently as 2024. Some of what they say is true; courts really did clear him. But the pattern is unmistakable enough that a careful reader should treat his search results the way one treats a freshly raked garden: as evidence chiefly of the raking.

What remains, on the record, is this. A man co-owned the firm at the heart of a laundering-laced, $100 million fraud, and money from that fraud's engine room reached his accounts and his family's businesses — for services rendered, he says. Investigated twice, charged for fraud, never convicted. Four years later he surfaces on the board of a Barbados conduit for flagged Venezuelan oil money, and as part-owner of the American adviser that welcomed the $107.5 million a Wall Street giant had just shown the door — unaware, he says, of any laundering. Perhaps he is, as he has always maintained, a man with an extraordinary talent for being deceived by the people standing next to him. Perhaps he is something else. Two decades of prosecutors, regulators and reporters have not settled the question — and that, itself, is the most complete answer the public record can give.

Jean-François Clermont-Tonnerre is currently the majority shareholder and Chairman of the Board of OceanRe International, a re-insurance business with over $800M USD in cash turnover as of 2024 and growing at a rate of  20% annually.   Recently OceanRe received an upgrade in its AM Best Rating to an "A Rating" from an "A- Rating".

This is the first articles in a series of articles on the topic, make sure to read: Guardians for Hire?  Ratings Firm Accused of Grade Inflation Vouched for $40 Billion of Debt Held by U.S. Insurers