Times O' London June 16 2000 Secrets and ties of Dutch family chain FROM DAVID LISTER IN BRUSSELS THEY are rarely seen in public, never give interviews and even their senior employees are forced to communicate with them in code. The super-secretive Brenninkmeijer family, with a fortune estimated at £1.6 billion, was coming to terms yesterday with having its business interests suddenly forced into the limelight. Until recently the Dutch family, who are said to have clothed Hermann Goering during the Second World War, seemed to have hit on a money-making formula. Their C&A clothing chain, started by brothers Clemens and August in 1841, boasted 577 stores in 12 European countries as well as shops in the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina and their secretivenes seemed an acceptable price of their success. The limits they were prepared to go to retain their affairs are legendary. All staff were said to take an oath of loyalty to C&A, while to get a job, prospective employees used to have to subject themselves to a humiliating grilling in front of the whole family. Even senior executives had no idea how much money C&A made because they were never shown the company's accounts. According to one Dutch journalist, a family elder once remarked that "openness is a sign of weakness", but the Brenninkmeijers' secretiveness appears to have owed at least something to history. Like most of Europe's great financial dynasties, the family is alleged to have thrown itself behind the Nazis during the Second World War. Over the past few years, however, the secrecy of their affairs has begun to unravel as deepening financial losses forced them to look beyond the family to fill top jobs at C&A. In Europe alone, the Brussels-based C&A chain has been leaking money at the rate of £1 million a week, or £140,000 a day. In America, the family's experiment at running general department stores hit problems after a disastrous expansion campaign, forced it to close 75 of its 1,000 stores in July last year with the loss of 4,000 jobs. For a family which prides itself on thrift and keeping out of the public eye, it has been disastrous on both fronts. According to a survey by America's Forbes magazine in 1998, the Brenninkmeijers were worth £2.5 billion. In the same survey a year later, the magazine re-estimated their wealth at £1.6 billion. In the 2000 Forbes billionaires' list, published yesterday, the family has dropped out altogether.
