Benoit Violier: suicide from stress or wine fraud?

The death of Benoit Violier, a forty-four-year-old Franco-Swiss chef at the Hotel de Ville in Crissier, near Lausanne, has recently caused a stir.

Many theories lie behind his suicide, but lately a fraud involving certain French wines is gaining ground; at least this is what the Swiss newspaper Bilan claims, having picked up the lead thanks to the testimony of a restaurateur.

A system of investments, tastings, and auctions involving Domaine Henry Jayer – a producer who died at the age of 86 in 2006 and was a great innovator – whose wines can fetch as much as 15,000 euros per bottle.

Benoit was a three-Michelin-star chef, considered one of the best in the world, yet despite his experience in the field he had apparently lost around one million euros – a circumstance that is said to have driven him, on January 31st, to turn his hunting rifle on himself, on the very day before the release of the most important guide in the industry. The date of the event itself led people to consider the theory of stress caused by a Michelin star he might have been about to lose, and the frayed nerves resulting from increasingly demanding food critics toward someone who, for years, had stood at the very top of the Olympus of great Chefs.

The fraud began with the "courting" of the chef in order to win his trust; the victim would then be taken to a wine auction, and the products would be sold to him on paper but never actually delivered.

In the crosshairs of investigators is Private Finance Partners, a financial brokerage firm based in Sion, which had already gone bankrupt three months earlier and one of whose partners had been released from prison shortly before the suicide.

Among the victims of the fraud are said to be several high-profile chefs.

It was not stress, therefore, that lay behind the death, but unfortunately cold hard money and unscrupulous people.

At Benoit's funeral in Lausanne, more than 1,500 people attended; the chef was buried in Montils, in France, where he was born and where his mother and one of his six siblings live.