A lonely billionaire decided to adopt his gardener to bequeath his fortune (4 photos)
Lonely and childless 80-year-old billionaire Nicolas Puech urgently needs someone to write off his inheritance. In this regard, the grandson of the founder of Hermes decided to adopt his 51-year-old gardener “from a modest Moroccan family.” 
Nicolas Puech, 80, a descendant of Hermès founder Thierry Hermes, owns $11 billion worth of Hermès shares and is considered one of the richest Swiss. But there is a problem. The elderly billionaire has no children. And there is no wife and apparently no relatives either, since at the moment Puech has taken an unconventional move, trying to adopt his 51-year-old gardener in order to transfer his fortune to him as an inheritance. This was reported by La Tribune and Fortune. 
Puech owns about 5-6% of the fashion house's shares, which are valued at $11.4 billion. In 2011, he signed a succession agreement with the Geneva-based Isocrates foundation, which fights disinformation. Now the billionaire has changed his mind and decided to transfer his fortune to a gardener and handyman from a “modest Moroccan family.” 
The billionaire cannot unilaterally terminate the contract with Isocrates, so he turned to lawyers who, as a workaround, decided to register the gardener as Puech’s adopted son.
Adopting an adult in Switzerland is extremely difficult from a legal point of view, but theoretically it is possible. If Puech succeeds in adopting the 51-year-old gardener, the latter could receive at least half of the billionaire's fortune.
Puech has already given the potential heir the keys to his house in Morocco and a villa in Switzerland. The total cost of this property is $5.9 million, reports Pavila Life magazine.
The gardener, by the way, is married and has two children.
As they say, “don’t be born beautiful.” 
Nicolas Puech made his debut on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2013. He is an eighth-generation descendant of Thierry Hermes, founder of Hermes, one of the most popular luxury brands in the world. Thierry founded a saddlery workshop in Paris in 1837. The firm now makes more than $3.8 billion in revenue, selling products ranging from leather clothing and silk scarves to jewelry and perfume around the world. Puech joined Hermes' board of trustees in 2012, and as a result the company disclosed Puech's shareholding in its annual report. Another billionaire, Bernard Arnault, controls more than 22% of Hermes shares through his LVMH Group.
