Western Europe: Empire at Bernie-Voltaire

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Eager-Beaver Techniques. Cornfeld also had his difficulties in Geneva, where authorities claimed that I.O.S. employed some 500 foreigners while holding only 93 working permits. But he insists that the real trouble was caused by resentment on the part of "the European banking establishment." Indeed, l.O.S.'s eager-beaver sales techniques often offend Swiss finance men, many of whom nonetheless express grudging admiration. "It took an American," says one with ill-concealed envy, "to sniff the world's private nest eggs out of the mattresses." To bolster l.O.S.'s image, Cornfeld recently hired Erich Mende, who will step down as leader of West Germany's Free Democratic Party and become the $30,000-a-year head of l.O.S.'s German subsidiary. Cornfeld has also signed on F.D.R.'s son James to act as his personal diplomat and to run the I.O.S. Foundation, a five-year-old charitable setup into which Cornfeld's company puts 5% of its profits.

A hard-driving man who brings almost missionary zeal to his work, Cornfeld is a bachelor who appreciates the good life. Ensconced in his velvet-lined office in Ferney-Voltaire, where lissome multilingual secretaries flock around him, Bernie says softly that "we are a comparatively small company compared with where we are going." What he is doing, he says, is "democratizing capitalism." And making it pay.