Switzerland-based liner giant Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC) started with a single ship bought with help from a client of founding banker Gianluigi Aponte.
The group’s story begins with the Aponte family’s small shipping company in Sorrento, southern Italy.
The future billionaire was born in 1940, but his father died of malaria when he was five years old, having gone to seek his fortune in Somalia, a report by Swiss dailies Le Matin Dimanche and Sonntagszeitung revealed.
As a teenager, Aponte worked on ships as a seafarer, sweeping, scraping off rust, repainting and washing dishes.
At 20, he had become an officer.
During a trip to Capri in the middle of the 1960s, he met future wife and co-owner of MSC, Rafaela Diamant, the daughter of an Israeli businessman. He joined her as a broker at a Swiss bank.
One of his clients at the time described him as “not tall, very pleasant”. But the work bored him and he dreamt of forming his own shipping company.
The report claimed a French client, Dominique Denat, helped him achieve this.
In 1970, Denat loaned $200,000 to enable Aponte to buy a first ship, the Korbach, renamed as the Patricia. With this vessel, MSC was born.
Denat does not hold fond memories of this time, however, telling the newspapers he is “bitterly disappointed” with how things turned out.
He was quickly ostracised by Aponte and his wife. “Without me, MSC would never have existed,” he said.
The company has declined to comment on the episode.
Denat is not mentioned in MSC’s official history on its website. The Patricia shuttled between Europe and Africa, laden with cement, coffee or wood.
By 1979, the company had 17 vessels.
“When he saw that a [company] was floundering and wanted to sell a ship, he bought it”, former colleague Pierre DuPasquier said.
Today, the group controls hundreds of container ships, cruise vessels, ferries, tugs, terminals and cargo planes.
