Job Ariste's private foundation is in the French media spotlight after agreeing to invest $17-million in the embattled Stade Francais rugby club.
A Montreal foundation's investment to save a prestigious but cash-strapped Paris rugby team continues to raise eyebrows in France, with a rival club president calling the transaction "totally absurd" and asking where the money comes from.
The Parisian team, the venerable Stade Français, has been national champion 13 times but was in financial straits this spring until it announced last week that a little-known Montreal group, FACEM, had agreed to invest $17-million, acquiring roughly a third of the club's equity.
FACEM, the French abbreviation for Foundation to Improve the Conditions of Children in the World, was incorporated in Montreal in 2002.
The foundation's president, Haitian-born Montreal businessman Job Ariste, said the money comes from private investors but won't reveal more.
"The capital does not come from us," he said in an interview Tuesday, explaining that FACEM is representing a number of business partners and that the foundation hopes that eventual benefits could be used for humanitarian projects.
Stade Français's cash problems, which threatened to relegate the club to a less prestigious league, come just as the city of Paris is in the middle of a $210-million overhaul of the team's Jean Bouin stadium.
Bernard Laporte, a former Stade Français coach who lives next to Jean Bouin stadium, came to the rescue last month.
A former national coach, Mr. Laporte was also briefly a junior sports minister for French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Mr. Laporte has said he heard of FACEM through an investment consultant, Stéphane Benhamou, who has worked with the foundation in France.
FACEM has a 51-per-cent stake in a corporation created last month by Mr. Laporte, which now owns 66 per cent of Stade Français, according to the French sports paper L'équipe.
FACEM's involvement into the Stade Français rescue is "morally crass," one rival team president, Mourad Boudjellal, of Rugby Club Toulon, complained this week.
"Now we have a Canadian group, a kind of smelly entity, saying, 'Come to my place, the revenues will be invested for mistreated children.' What does that mean? What planet are we on? Once I've lived well, paid everyone, the fees and commissions, if there's money left I'll invest for mistreated children? This smells," Mr. Boudjellal told reporters Monday.
"We have to save Stade Français, but there are other ways than to look for an entity whose core business is dealing with mistreated children. We shouldn't play with those things. The 12 million [euros]they're supposed to chip in, where did they get it? … It's totally absurd."
In its incorporation filing, FACEM lists its main activity as "Aid to underprivileged children, product of activities (investments and financing)."
However, FACEM is a private foundation, not a registered charity that issues tax receipts to donors and has open books.
Mr. Ariste said the foundation won't give more details until it holds a press conference in France at the end of the month.
"One of these days I promise I will show you how we work. You'll see there's nothing crooked or illegal."
He confirmed that his foundation had handled "a lot of files" with Mr. Benhamou and his Lyon-based consulting firm, Herios Finance.
Mr. Ariste is an elder and secular deacon in the Seventh Day Adventist church. In addition to humanitarian projects in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, he said the foundation does business in Europe but he wouldn't elaborate.
"We almost have to hide. There are so many projects, so many people contacting us. ... Some from France, England, Germany, Belgium, Spain and now the Middle East."