The Democrat financier and former US ambassador to Paris, Felix Rohatyn, died on December 14 at his Manhattan home. Aged 91, he had saved New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s. Known for his negotiating skills, pivotal of the investment firm Lazard, where he spent almost half a century, he had chaired numerous industrial mergers and acquisitions and advised business leaders and presidents.
Felix Rohatyn's journey is that of a Central European immigrant chased by the rise of Nazism. Born in Vienna on May 29, 1928, to a Polish Jewish father and a mother from a family of wealthy city bankers, he left Austria at the age of 6 with his parents, for France . In 1942, under the Vichy regime, his mother fled again, this time to Brazil, thanks to Ambassador Luis Martins de Souza Dantas, who helped some 400 Jews to leave France. Then to the United States. Her mother made her hide a few gold coins in toothpaste tubes. "That’s all we had left, Rohatyn wrote in his autobiography. Since then, I have always had the feeling that the only lasting wealth is that which is carried in your head. "
The teenager was studying at Middlebury College (Vermont). He obtained American nationality in 1948. On a return trip from France, he met Edith Piaf on the boat. Later, he will give English lessons to the singer, who performs in New York.
Contested practices
Thanks to his family's network, the young man got to know the French banker André Meyer, then at the head of Lazard. The financier becomes his mentor. The former refugee specializes in securities purchased in one currency and sold in another.
After his military service, carried out in the infantry in Germany, he returned to Lazard in 1953, with whom he acquired the rank of associate, then general manager in 1997. Some of his practices will be disputed, notably in Chile where the multinational of phone ITT, of which he is a member of the board of directors, lobbied against the election of the socialist Salvador Allende, assassinated in 1973. In 1975, decided to change his image, he became president of the Municipal Assistance Corporation of New York where he will be the architect of the city's rescue plan – a program of severe budget cuts that will get the municipality out of the deficit but which the unions and the Democratic Left will hold against him.
