PARIS (Reuters) – The family of billionaire Bernard Arnault, majority shareholder of the LVMH group, promised on Monday to pay aid of 10 million euros to Restos du Coeur, in great financial difficulty.
In a press release, the Arnault family specifies that Antoine Arnault, the son of Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France, will go to the premises of the Restos du Coeur on Tuesday to “concretize this solidarity gesture”.
He will be accompanied by the Minister of Solidarity and Families, Aurore Bergé, who herself announced on Sunday that the government would release 15 million euros to help the charity organization.
But the president of Restos du Coeur, Patrice Douret, who reported a hole of 35 million euros in the organization’s budget for 2023, stressed Monday morning that 10 of these 15 million were in fact “already in the pipes”.
“So the real increase is five million. It’s far below (the sum announced by the government)”, he declared on franceinfo.
“It’s going in the right direction, but it will take a lot more, on the one hand to help us fill the gap that is coming (…) and then secondly, we must also tackle the massive influx of people for almost a year now,” he continued.
“What is needed is to eradicate, to stop all this poverty which is increasing in the country and which means that today we have 170 million meals served in one year against 140 last year. It is becoming untenable.”
(Written by Tangi Salaün, Editing by Zhifan Liu)
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