Murder in the House of Ullens: The fall from grace of one of Belgium’s richest families / April 10, 2023: Myriam Ullens, 70, Philanthropic Baroness, Is Killed

 

Murder in the House of Ullens: The fall from grace of one of Belgium’s richest families

 

Police say a dispute over money is behind the shooting of Baroness Myriam Ullens.

 

By NICOLAS CAMUT

in Ohain, Belgium

Photo-illustrations by Beatrice Caciotti for POLITICO

 

January 27, 2025 4:02 am CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/myriam-ullens-baroness-murder-trial-baron-nicolas-guy-belgium-ohain/

 

On a cold and overcast morning in March 2023, Nicolas Ullens sat in a van outside his family’s estate, in a plush suburb an hour’s drive from Brussels.

 

Nicolas, then 57, had come to ask his father, the Baron Guy Ullens — once one of the richest men in Belgium — for money.

 

The baron had refused.

 

A short time later, 70-year-old Myriam Ullens, his father’s second wife, drove out of the estate at the wheel of a Volkswagen Golf, her 88-year-old husband in the passenger seat.

 

Nicolas was waiting in the van, his handgun loaded. As the Golf passed the gate of the property, he blocked their way. He got out of the van, walked up to the driver’s window and fired six bullets, killing his stepmother and injuring his father.

 

Half an hour later, he turned himself in at a nearby police station and confessed to the crime.

 

Those are the facts of the day that marked the end of Myriam’s life.

 

What followed was a battle of narratives. They featured many storylines: a declining empire of colonial riches; scrambles up (and down) the social ranks; a caricatured stepmother; a failed whistleblowing attempt; all taking place in an elite game of reputations and fortunes, jealousy and control.

 

The perpetrator, the witness, the family, the lawyers, the press and the public have all argued their sequences of events that led up to this critical morning.

 

In the coming months, each author’s variation will be played out on the austere stage of a criminal court in the Belgian city of Nivelles, where Nicolas is set to stand trial.

 

Myriam, for her part, will not have that luxury.

 

Act 1: The Inheritance

In the Belgian aristocracy, a family’s standing is determined by three things: rank, money and how far back its lineage can be traced. The Ullens can count on the last two.

 

Originally a family of wealthy merchants and financiers from the port city of Antwerp, the Ullens were ennobled in 1693, when Belgium was under Spanish rule — meaning that their title is older than their country.

 

That title was awarded by Charles II, king of Spain, “a source of great pride for the family,” according to Jean-François Houtart, the author of a book tracing the history of Belgium’s most ancient families.

 

This makes the Ullens part of the Belgian nobility’s inner circle. There are roughly 1,200 aristocratic families in Belgium, a total of 32,500 people — but only about 350 families were already noble before the French Revolution.

 

“In the Belgian pantheon, the Ullens family ranks high,” said Houtart. “It’s quite a prestigious family, but mostly because it has money.”

 

The Ullens built their wealth at a time when Antwerp was the main trading center for colonial goods in Europe. Ships docked there to unload their precious cargoes of spices and sugar, cultivated by slaves, in the city’s warehouses.

 

Guy Ullens, born in 1935, inherited part of that fortune. In the 1980s, the baron-turned-businessman headed up the sugar producer Raffinerie Tirlemontoise, which had a quasi-monopoly on Belgium’s beetroot sugar refining industry.

 

In 1989, the firm was sold for €1.25 billion to a German company. Perhaps sensing the times were changing, the family holding moved away from sweets; instead, in 1999, it took over the American diet giant WeightWatchers.

 

By 2014, Guy’s personal fortune was estimated at over €3 billion, which he’d splashed on lavish properties — in China, the United States, an upscale Swiss ski resort, the swanky French sea town of Saint-Tropez and Belgium — and art.

 

In the 2000s, the baron’s art collection had grown to become one of the largest in the world. Some of it was stored in Geneva, Switzerland — but many pieces were showcased in the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the first contemporary art museum in China. It was inaugurated in November 2007, a few months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and quickly attracted illustrious guests such as the freshly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as Prince Philippe, heir to the Belgian throne.

 

With this growing prestige came additional distinctions. In 2010, during Sarkozy’s presidency, Guy was awarded the rank of knight of the French Légion d’honneur.

 

However, much of the baron’s wealth relied on the family holding’s golden goose, WeightWatchers, which had gone public in 2001.

 

And as the share price of the U.S. weight loss giant plunged, so did the baron’s fortune, which is currently valued at between €200 and €300 million.

 

He sold a yacht for about €18 million in 2015, as well as the Saint-Tropez property, according to Le Monde, then auctioned off parts of his art collection. The Beijing museum soon followed.

 

In just a decade, Guy’s wealth had been reduced to a tenth of his former affluence.

 

Act 2: The Lovers

But Guy had not been enjoying his riches alone.

 

At the turn of the millennium, at 64, Guy married Myriam Lechien, then 46. It was his second wedding, her third, and the conclusion of an affair that had been going on for eight years.

 

The daughter of a Belgian army officer, Myriam was born in Germany, where her father was stationed during her childhood.

 

A single mother, she had raised two children from her first marriage on her own. In the 1980s, while Guy was running the largest sugar business in the country, she was making pastries in her kitchen and delivering them to restaurants.

 

Guy and Myriam Ullens attend an event of their foundation in London in 2013. Next, the visits of Belgian King Philippe and Queen Mathilde and then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy to the Ullens’ Beijing museum in 2007. | Nick Harvey/WireImage for Mimi Foundation, François Mori and Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

 

She met Guy when her business was taking off and she was looking for an associate. “It was love at first sight … I didn’t even know that was possible,” she later told French public broadcaster France 2.

 

For most of the year, Guy and Myriam — or “Mimi,” as she was known — lived in a fancy Swiss ski resort where the Belgian royal family regularly stays in the winter.

 

“Our main ‘houses’ are a plane and a boat,” Guy told The Wall Street Journal in 2013.

 

Myriam’s pastry days were long gone — she had sold the business during her affair with Guy — and she took on a new set of activities, which included the launch of a high-end fashion brand, Maison Ullens, in 2009.

 

In Belgium’s cloistered high society, the flamboyant couple quickly became the talk of the town, with much of the chatter focusing on Mimi.

 

“When a woman marries a wealthy man … tongues begin to wag,” said Hugo Strachwitz, a British nobleman familiar with the practices of Europe’s aristocratic circles. “As a … relatively new arrival within society, one of the quickest ways to gain acceptance is by dispensing as much charity as possible.”

 

Myriam, who had “always dreamed of doing charity work,” asked the baron to finance schools, orphanages and a maternity center in Nepal. After beating breast cancer, she opened a foundation helping cancer patients in Belgian, French and Swiss hospitals.

 

Despite her best efforts, however, Mimi never seemed to gain acceptance in the muffled world of the Old Continent’s aristocracy.

 

For newcomers like her, “an amount of humility is expected that she did not exercise,” said Strachwitz. “Being outspoken is never a good way to enter a new community.”

 

In a 2015 interview with Europe 1, Myriam said her new life as a billionaire’s wife came with its share of issues. “You have just as many problems when you’re rich as when you’re poor, but it’s different,” she said. “The problems are different.”

 

Act 3: The Son

Nicolas Ullens, one of four children from Guy’s first marriage, was facing his own challenges.

 

For over a decade, Nicolas had worked for the Belgian civil intelligence service, a prestigious position — albeit in the shadows — suited to the son of a well-respected family.

 

But in 2018 he resigned, later claiming to have uncovered a money laundering and corruption scheme as part of his work as an intelligence officer. The network’s apparent masterminds were Didier Reynders, at the time Belgium’s foreign minister, and his longtime adviser and right-hand man for over 20 years, Jean-Claude Fontinoy, Nicolas asserted.

 

Claiming to be a whistleblower, he published several videos backing up his theories on YouTube and a separate video channel, and defended his claims in the Belgian press.

 

In an 11-minute clip entitled “The adventures of Didi and Fonty — shady business in Kinshasa,” Nicolas, facing the camera, claimed to have found irregularities in the construction of a new Belgian embassy in Congo — a former Belgian colony — for which he said Reynders and his adviser bore responsibility.

 

Nicolas went to the police with his findings. These were investigated by the Brussels public prosecutor’s office, which closed the case a few weeks later due to the lack of evidence against Reynders.

 

In the meantime, Reynders had been nominated to serve as Belgium’s European commissioner, and was ultimately awarded the justice portfolio. Contacted by POLITICO when he was still commissioner, Reynders’ Cabinet declined to comment on the legal proceedings.

 

When discussing the Nicolas Ullens case after Myriam’s murder, Reynders looked confident, “serene,” one of his former advisers recalled. “He simply told me that [Nicolas] Ullens was ‘a madman who, besides, had murdered his mother-in-law.’”

 

Fontinoy, the other person accused by Ullens, told POLITICO he was “never” approached by prosecutors in the case.

 

“I have nothing to answer” to Nicolas’ accusations, he said. “I’ve never met him, I’ve never spoken to him.”

 

That case cost Nicolas his job, his reputation and nearly landed him in jail. In January 2021, the Brussels prosecutor’s office opened an investigation against him for breaches of professional secrecy. The prosecutor’s office told POLITICO the investigation is ongoing.

 

Between the family’s business activities taking a sour turn and his father and stepmother’s grand lifestyle, Nicolas’ fortune was slowly melting away.

 

Act 4: The Press

The day after Myriam’s killing, the local prosecutor’s office issued a statement saying the suspected killer had justified his deed “in the context of a family dispute, notably of a financial order.”

 

The gruesome details of Myriam’s murder were splashed all over the national press, on both sides of Belgium’s language barrier. The baron’s wealth and notoriety as a patron of the arts also earned his deceased wife a eulogy in The New York Times.

 

Yet it wasn’t long before the tone began to change. Before the murder, references to the Ullens in the media had been sparse, limited to millionaires’ rankings or gushing coverage of Guy’s passion for the arts and Myriam’s charity work (sometimes mixed with laudatory accounts of their love story).

 

As journalists seized on this Belgian noir, gorging on the macabre details of a case that seemed ripped from a true crime novel, the story began to focus not on the misdeeds of the alleged murderer — but on his victim.

 

In leaked excerpts from the suspected shooter’s police questioning and testimonies from relatives, Myriam was depicted as a manipulative stepmother scheming to keep the family’s billions to herself, and blamed for frittering them away.

 

Nicolas complained of his “awful stepmother” whom he accused of diverting the family’s money toward her two adult children from a previous marriage, at the expense of the baron’s four biological children.

 

In an interview with Belgian daily Het Nieuwsblad published two days after the murder, Brigitte Ullens, Nicolas’ sister, accused Myriam of “want[ing] everything for herself” and “destroy[ing]” the family.

The funeral of Myriam Ullens in Ohain on April 7, 2023. Next, journalists during the ceremony and a security perimeter during a reconstruction of the murder scene in May 2023. | Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga via Getty Imagess

 

 

In another, published by Het Laatste Nieuws several months later, the former wife of Myriam’s son claimed she had been a “manipulator” who “played with people like Lego blocks.”

 

Laurent Kennes, the lawyer for Myriam’s children, said the media frenzy portraying the baron’s wife as a “venal stepmother” was “very, very shocking.” He refuted claims that she had taken advantage of the family’s wealth, saying the baron “gave to everyone,” his four children and two stepchildren.

 

“Since when is it a motive for murder, or even for blame, to accept money from your husband?” the lawyer asked.

 

Since October 2023 and his release after nearly six months in jail, Nicolas has lived under house arrest. He has to wear an electronic bracelet while awaiting trial, which likely will not start until next year. The court where the trial is to take place is facing a shortage of clerks.

 

In several months’ time, from the dock of the accused, Nicolas will have to face his father, who has chosen not to speak publicly since the murder. Days after the shooting, Guy filed a civil lawsuit against his son.

 

The court and the 12 jurors will have to assess whether the murder was premeditated — which Nicolas denies.

 

Nicolas’ lawyers declined to comment before the trial. In April 2023, shortly after the murder, his legal team spoke to Le Soir.

 

“Of course, in wealthy families, money is the source of a lot of tension, but this case is not just about money, it’s about human relationships,” said Dimitri De Beco, one of his lawyers. “It’s much more complex than that, we’d like to bring that up during trial.”

 

Dozens of witnesses, including many family members, are expected to take the stand during the trial. The testimonies from Nicolas’ siblings, his father, Myriam’s children and grandchildren as well as family friends who can attest to the bond (or lack thereof) that the baron and Myriam shared, will lay bare the family’s divisions.

 

The personalities and characters of Myriam and Nicolas, as presented by the witnesses picked by both sides, will also be crucial elements of the proceedings.

 

When the trial eventually starts, all of the case’s protagonists will have the chance to say their piece. All but one: Myriam, who was buried in April 2023.

 

April 10, 2023: Myriam Ullens, 70, Philanthropic Baroness, Is Killed

 

A stepson was held on charges of shooting her over family money. She started institutions in Belgium, Nepal and China, including a major museum in Beijing.

 

Alex Traub

By Alex Traub

Published April 10, 2023

Updated April 11, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/arts/myriam-ullens-dead.html

 

Myriam Ullens, a pastry chef who married a billionaire Belgian aristocrat and turned his fortune into a globe-spanning source of philanthropy, was fatally shot on March 29 in Ohain, a village in the Walloon Brabant province of central Belgium. She was 70.

 

Her stepson Nicolas Ullens presented himself to the local police and said he had killed Ms. Ullens, the province prosecutor’s office said. The authorities seized a handgun from him and proceeded to the home of Ms. Ullens and her husband, Guy Ullens, where they found her dead in a Volkswagen and Mr. Ullens beside her, in a state of shock, with a wounded leg.

 

According to the prosecutor’s statement, Nicolas attributed his actions to a family fight over money and said that moments before he shot his stepmother he had been arguing with her and his father at their home and had been asked to leave. He was being held in jail and has been charged with premeditated murder and violating weapons laws, the prosecutor’s office said.

 

Ms. Ullens’s death was a sordid end to a life that had seemed like a fairy tale, or at least a fairy tale in the age of global capitalism.

 

In the early 1990s, Ms. Ullens (pronounced YU-lens) was raising two children on her own and seeking investors so that she could expand her small pastry business, which had shops in Brussels and Waterloo, Belgium. She arranged a meeting with Mr. Ullens, a titled baron and married father of four who had recently sold his family’s beet sugar refinery for $1 billion.

 

When the door opened and he appeared, Ms. Ullens experienced a “coup de foudre” — a French expression that equates love at first sight with a thunderbolt — she told the French magazine Madame Figaro in 2014. “He is my Pygmalion, the man whom I love and who made me break out of my shell,” she said.

 

Mr. Ullens, in a 2014 interview with The Kathmandu Post, fondly described her as the “queen of pastry” with a passion for charity.

 

In 1999, after Mr. Ullens divorced his wife, he married Myriam. The same year, his family firm, Artal, bought Weight Watchers for $735 million in what Forbes in 2018 called “one of the best private equity deals ever.”

 

“Guy asked me to quit my company,” Ms. Ullens told Global Citizen magazine in 2015. “I accepted, but told him I was going to get involved in philanthropy instead.”

 

In 2000, Mr. Ullens — whose full surname, which he often abbreviated, is Ullens de Schooten Whettnal — retired from business, missing out on billions in potential future earnings, according to Forbes. With his new wife, he put his fortune in service to a charitable spending spree.

 

The Ullenses’ most remarkable project, opening in 2007, was the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

 

It “was the first international-standard museum in China dedicated to contemporary art,” Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, said in an interview. “It had capacity in scale that no other museum in China had at the time of its opening, and that very few have even reached since then.”

 

The museum’s first exhibition, “’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art,” helped establish a new canon in art history. At the same time, the museum brought to China the work of foreign artists like Robert Rauschenberg.

 

The idea for the museum arose from Mr. Ullens’s years of travel to China as a businessman, and from the passion for China he shared with his wife.

 

“When we started going there in the early 1990s, Chinese contemporary art was not as fashionable,” she told Global Citizen.

 

“Artists hid themselves in the aftermath of 1989,” she added, referring to the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square. “We would visit them in very hidden places, looking at the paintings with a torch in a staircase or a parking lot.”

 

In 2017, the Ullenses sold the museum to Chinese investors in a deal put together by Lunar, a Shanghai private equity firm. Since then, its internationalist spirit has persisted. From this past October to January it presented “Somewhere Downtown: Art in 1980s New York,” an exhibition that included more than a dozen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

 

The institution has also grown; it now includes three buildings throughout China that draw more than a million visitors a year. Its success has inspired several of the museum’s Chinese benefactors to open art institutions of their own, Philip Tinari, the U.C.C.A.’s director, said in an interview.

 

Myriam Lechien, who was also known as Mimi, was born on Sept. 23, 1952, in Cologne, in what was then West Germany, where her father, Paul, a colonel in the Belgian Army, was stationed. Her mother, Monique (de Drijver) Lechien, was a homemaker.

 

Her parents sent her to a boarding school in Belgium near the country’s border with West Germany. On a trip home, she met a young Belgian soldier named Roger Lemaire, who, like her father, was stationed in West Germany. She married him when she was 18.

 

The couple had two children, Gilles and Virginie, but divorced when Myriam was in her mid-20s. A second marriage, to Christian de Moffarts, a conference planner, also ended in divorce. In the late 1980s, she began baking pastries in the kitchen of her home and delivering them to restaurants.

 

Nevertheless, she still found time and energy to try to help those less fortunate than her. She began visiting Nepal after a friend told her that it was an affordable and practical place for charitable endeavors. Her fledgling efforts to help children with poor or absent parents culminated, after she met Mr. Ullens, in her establishment of an orphanage outside Kathmandu, the nation’s capital. Nearby, the baron and baroness also built the Ullens School, which offers an international baccalaureate curriculum.

 

Her other projects included the Mimi Foundation, which created support systems for cancer patients in French and Belgian hospitals; Club des Combins, an organization that provides insurance to the mountain guides of Verbier, an alpine Swiss resort; and Maison Ullens, a clothing line that aims at “the perfect travel wardrobe,” according to its website, with stores in Paris, New York and Aspen, Colo.

 

The European press described the Ullenses as friendly with European aristocrats like Prince Charles and Belgium’s king and queen. Their travel between Switzerland, China, France, Belgium and the Maldives led Mr. Ullens to tell The Wall Street Journal in 2013, “Our main ‘houses’ are a plane and a boat.” He complained about the lack of wall space in their Swiss chalet for hanging their art.

 

Since the fatal shooting, the Ullenses’ munificence and glamour have been scrutinized and gossiped about in the Belgian news media. Nicolas Ullens was already a figure of some notoriety as a former Belgian intelligence officer who in recent years had made dramatic accusations of government corruption. Following Mimi’s killing, Nicolas’s sister, Brigitte Ullens, has publicly defended his character and accused their stepmother of financial selfishness and of dividing the family.

 

In addition to Nicolas and Brigitte Ullens, Ms. Ullens is survived by her husband; a brother, Philippe; a sister, Geneviève Lechien; her children from her first marriage; two more stepsons; five grandchildren; and many step-grandchildren and step-great-grandchildren.

 

One factor inspiring the Ullenses to build so many institutions was the pleasure they took in starting something new together, Laurent Degryse, the husband of Ms. Ullens’s daughter, Virginie, said in a phone interview.

 

“They would wake up in the middle of the night, prepare jasmine tea and start a whole conversation,” he said. “At the end of the night, the project would have taken another turn.”

 

Koba Ryckewaert contributed research.

 

Alex Traub works on the Obituaries desk and occasionally reports on New York City for other sections of the paper. More about Alex Traub