Welcome to FrAvarice: Where Public Land Becomes Private Loot
An exposé from the windswept dunes of Montalivet to the gilded boardrooms of global finance.
In the sun-bleached pine forests of southwest France, nestled beside the Atlantic’s salty breath, lies a supposed utopia of naturist living: CHM Montalivet. Touted as a bastion of liberté, simplicité, and communion with nature, CHM sells an image of carefree vacationing and communal living. But peel back the layer of sunscreen, and a different picture emerges — one that has more to do with rent-seeking, privatization, and opaque financial flows than it does with sandcastles and sunbathing.
🏕️ A Model of Communal Living… or Extractive Leasing?
CHM Montalivet sits on land owned by the municipality of Vendays-Montalivet — technically public land. In theory, this should mean oversight, accountability, and benefit to the public. In practice? That land is leased to a private company — most recently European Camping Group (ECG) (via various subsidiaries) — which in turn subleases it to over a thousand mobile home owners, vacationers, and around 300 permanent residents.
These residents don’t own the land their homes sit on — they lease it. And every year, the cost of that lease creeps ever upward. Residents are faced with substantial, opaque fees for things like “management services,” “infrastructure contributions,” “waste collection,” or whatever creative label the accountants prefer this year.
And where does the real value go? Not back to the town. Not into the site. But up the financial food chain — to private equity firms who treat CHM not as a community, but as a yield-generating asset.
💰 Follow the Money: Carlyle, OTPP, and PAI Partners
SOCNAT’s parent company, European Camping Group, has passed through the hands of some of the world’s most powerful private equity players:
Carlyle Group (USA): A titan of global finance with deep ties to government and defense contracting.
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (Canada): Because what better way to fund retirement than to wring euros from a naturist campsite?
PAI Partners (France): The current controlling shareholder, headquartered in Paris, recently sold a stake to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
These firms don’t invest for love of camping. They invest for IRR — internal rate of return. Every fee, every rent hike, every cutback in services is a pixel in a larger spreadsheet — one aimed at maximizing extraction from residents who often have no meaningful alternative.
📧 Silencing Dissent, One Reservation at a Time
What happens when someone questions this setup?
… lack of transparency: undisclosed lease terms between the town and ECG, exorbitant sublease fees, and the slow economic erosion of resident property value in favour of shareholder gain …
The response?
Reservation denied.
Subject Access Request (under GDPR)? Refused.
Reason given? Not law — just satire. Yes, the whistleblower’s use of mild irony in their correspondence was offered as a pretext for the withdrawal of service.
In other words, SOCNAT, operating a business on publicly owned land, using the name of CHM — is now engaging in retaliatory exclusion, punishing those who ask too many questions with commercial exile.
🧯 FrAvarice in Action
Welcome to FrAvarice, where:
Public land is quietly monetised for private gain;
Residents pay top euro to lease the land their homes stand on;
Transparency is treated like a nuisance, not a civic duty;
And whistleblowers are punished with silence, instead of answered with facts.
This isn’t just bad governance — it’s a case study in how privatised control over public assets enables soft censorship and economic displacement.
⚖️ What’s Next?
There are still questions to be answered:
What is the actual rent paid by ECG to the town for use of this land?
Why are hundreds of permanent residents treated like transient cash flows?
Can a private company operating on public land refuse service based on a customer’s protected whistleblower status?
Will French courts, data protection authorities, or anti-discrimination bodies respond?
For now, the answer seems to be: you can come to CHM, but only if you keep your mouth shut.
FrAvarice is not just a joke. It’s a mirror — held up to the face of modern governance, where the illusion of community masks the reality of capital extraction. Whether you’re in a tent, a mobile home, or a beachfront chalet, one thing’s clear:
In this game of public land and private loot, transparency is the one thing nobody’s renting.