Claude Dauphin was one of his generation’s most innovative and energetic businessmen. A suave, immaculately dressed Frenchman, he was an art collector and wine and cigar connoisseur, at once colourful yet secretive, a disruptive control freak who demanded unquestioning loyalty. He had a self-confidence bordering on arrogance, which landed him in an African jail.
Dauphin, who was the founder chairman of the huge commodity trading business Trafigura Beheer, worked up to the day he died of lung cancer in a Colombian hospital. After his illness was diagnosed 18 months ago, he astonished colleagues with his relentless workrate, constantly flying round the world between chemotherapy sessions. His only concession was to become executive chairman instead of chief executive so that his successor, the Australian Jeremy Weir,