Michel de Carvalho

Spear’s Review

Michel de Carvalho is not your average wealth manager. In his late teens he became a movie star and acted opposite Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.

He dropped acting and went to Harvard, only to postpone his academic career when he ‘fell in to the British Olympic skiing team’. He returned to Harvard and became an investment banker, rising to vice chairman of Citi Investment Bank and chairman of Citi Private Bank for EMEA.

He is married to the multi-billionaire Heineken heiress Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, but Carvalho still has a day job and an office at Capital Generation Partners, where he is chairman. 

‘I help them chase the big fish,’ Carvalho tells Spear’s. It is easy to promote CapGen, he says, since his family are clients themselves. ‘The underlying philosophy of CapGen is that we are there for capital preservation,’ he says. ‘Every family has a tailor-made portfolio.’