Inside France’s €1bn manuscripts fraud | FT #shorts

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]France has been rocked by the fallout from a billion euro fraud involving papers, parties, and one of the most controversial authors of all time. And this is the man behind it. Gérard Lheritier started a company selling shares in manuscripts, the handwritten documents from famous authors like Balzac and Proust, and scientists like Albert Einstein. He put together bunches of them into portfolios and offered shares for a few thousand euros. He promised they'd make a 40% return after 5 years. And he had 20,000 investors. He even bought the manuscript for one of the most scandalous novels of all time, the Marquis de Sade's violent 120 Days of Sodom. Lheritier was living large on the proceeds. He used a private jet and a yacht, had a massive house in Paris, and threw lavish parties where the guests sang a song about him.

[00:00:42]But it was a fraud. He needed more and more new investors to pay the old investors, a classic Ponzi scheme. When things started to look bad for Lheritier, he needed a miracle, and he got one. He won 170 million euros in the lottery, but that only postponed his ruin. Last year, he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to jail. But in a final twist, he changed his plea to guilty and now will serve his time at his villa in Nice.

[00:01:04]Nice. There's a classic lesson for investors here. If the promises seem too good to be true, they probably are.