The Banque Louis-Dreyfus was a bank based in Paris, France. It was created in 1905 by commodities trader and financier Léopold Louis-Dreyfus, and eventually purchased in two stages in 1978 and 1989 by Bank Brussels Lambert (BBL), later part of ING.
Léopold Louis-Dreyfus founded the bank to facilitate financing of the activities of his family-held Louis Dreyfus Company, founded in 1850[1] and based in Paris since 1875, and particularly its creation of a fleet of commercial ships, an activity he had started in 1900. Also in 1905, Louis-Dreyfus commissioned a new headquarters for the bank from prominent architect Henri Paul Nénot. [2]
Following the Battle of France, the firm's assets in France were sequestered by the Vichy regime. From 1941 to 1944, the bank's building became the seat of the regime's Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs.[2]
The bank's activities restarted after France's liberation and were registered as an investment bank under French law in 1954.[3] In 1967, the bank transformed itself from a partnership (French: société en nom collectif) into a joint-stock company (French: société anonyme). At the time, it was France's tenth-largest investment bank by assets, ahead of the Banque Rothschild.[1]
in 1974, the Louis-Dreyfus group, including the bank, relocated form central Paris to a modern building at 87, avenue de la Grande-Armée on Porte Maillot, designed by architect Pierre Dufau and nicknamed the "blue diamond" (French: le diamant bleu) for its then-unusual blue-tinted curtain walls.[4]
In 1978, BBL acquired slightly over 50 percent of Banque Louis-Dreyfus,[5] then full ownership in 1989.[6] The Louis-Dreyfus Company created another bank, branded LD Finance, in 1994,[7] but sold a controlling stake in it in 1998.[6]
The bank's first head office on Place des Petits-Pères was later acquired by the French Ministry of Culture.[2] The "blue diamond" in turn was renovated with green-tinted glass cladding instead of Dufau's original blue.[4]