1830
Blyth Brothers and Ireland Fraser
Commercial activity begins in Mauritius under the two trading houses that would eventually combine to form Ireland Blyth.
The organisation
IBL Together, in context
The professional environment in which Arnaud Lagesse works: a Mauritian group whose commercial lineage reaches back to 1830, now operating as both an operator and an investor across the Indian Ocean and East Africa.
About this page
This page is contextual. It is not the official website of IBL Together and does not reproduce it. Its purpose is to explain the organisation sufficiently to make sense of the Group CEO's role — using only information the group and public records have already published. No internal strategy, forward-looking plan or confidential corporate information is disclosed or inferred here. For official corporate information, the group publishes its own materials directly.
01 — Lineage
Almost two centuries, in six moves
The group as it exists today is the result of successive combinations. Each of these steps is a matter of public record, drawn from the group's own published history and from stock exchange filings.
1939
Mon Loisir sugar estate
Joseph Lagesse acquires the estate, establishing the family's position in the agricultural economy and the origin of what became GML.
1970
CIDL is formed
A structural step in the consolidation of the family's holdings, in the same year Mauritius established its Export Processing Zone.
1972
Ireland Blyth Ltd
Blyth Brothers and Ireland Fraser merge, creating one of the island's principal trading and services companies.
2016
IBL Ltd
Amalgamation of Ireland Blyth Ltd and GML Investissement. Renamed IBL Ltd and listed on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius on 14 July.
2026
IBL Together
Ten years after the merger, the group refreshes its identity and states its purpose as “Shaping better lives and better tomorrows. Together.”
280+
Companies operated across the group's four clusters.Portfolio
25
Countries of operation, across the Indian Ocean, East Africa and beyond.Geography
39,500+
People employed by group companies, as reported by IBL.Workforce
14 July 2016
Date of listing on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius following amalgamation.Listing
02 — The role
Where the Group CEO's responsibility begins and ends
“Group CEO” is a title that means different things in different organisations, and the difference matters. In a group of this structure, the role is not to manage operating companies. Each of those has its own management and, in many cases, its own board and minority shareholders.
What the group centre holds is narrower and more consequential: where capital goes, who leads each business, what standard of governance applies, and what the organisation is collectively trying to become. The list below sets out that division as it generally applies in listed diversified groups of this kind.
- Capital allocation
- Deciding which businesses receive investment, which are held flat, and which are sold. This is the single most consequential lever the centre controls.
- Portfolio composition
- Determining what the group should own at all — acquisitions, partnerships, exits and the structure through which each is held.
- Senior appointments
- Selecting and holding accountable the executives who run each cluster and each significant operating company.
- Group strategy
- Setting direction across the portfolio — in IBL's case, the Beyond Borders strategy launched in 2021 and the 2025 reorganisation into four clusters.
- Standards and governance
- Establishing the behavioural, financial and reporting standards that apply everywhere in the group, and ensuring the board can see whether they hold.
- External representation
- Accounting for the group to shareholders, regulators, the Stock Exchange of Mauritius and the public.
- Not the role
- Day-to-day operation of individual subsidiaries. Attempting it at this scale would remove the advantage of having a devolved structure in the first place.
IBL Ltd's published director profile records Arnaud Lagesse as an executive director and Group CEO, and lists his core competencies as business and finance, deal structuring, and strategic business development.
03 — Purpose and values
“Shaping better lives and better tomorrows. Together.”
Adopted with the group's identity refresh in February 2026, alongside three stated values. The commentary beneath each is this website's own reading of what the value implies operationally — not an official interpretation.
Truth
Sincere feedback and clear communication that build trust.
In practice this is a test of how bad news travels. Organisations that genuinely hold this value find out about problems from the people closest to them, early, rather than from auditors or the press.
Trust
The bedrock of working relationships, earned through consistency and integrity.
At group scale, trust is what makes delegation affordable. Every unit of it that does not exist has to be replaced by supervision, reporting and control — all of which cost time and slow decisions.
Together
Breaking silos to unlock potential across teams and communities.
The hardest of the three for a diversified group, where businesses have every incentive to optimise locally. It is also the only justification for holding them under one roof rather than separately.
“These aren't just words to us. Together has always been part of our brand.”Arnaud LagesseIBL corporate communication, February 2026
04 — Areas of activity
A portfolio weighted toward the everyday economy
What is notable about this list is what it mostly is not. There is little in it that depends on speculative valuation, and a great deal that depends on people eating, travelling, building, insuring, receiving care and moving goods.
That orientation has consequences. Businesses of this type are generally lower margin and more operationally demanding than asset-light alternatives. They require physical infrastructure, large workforces and continuous attention to cost. In exchange, demand for them persists through cycles in a way that discretionary spending does not.
It also explains the group's regional thesis. Everyday consumption in East Africa is growing and formalising — shifting from informal markets toward organised retail and branded distribution. A group whose existing competence is in exactly those categories is better placed to participate in that shift than one that would have to learn it.
The 2025 cluster reorganisation reflected this reality directly, grouping businesses by how they actually behave — volume-driven retail, brand-driven distribution, capital-intensive industrials, people-intensive services — rather than by the historical sector labels they had inherited.
Sources: IBL Group published corporate materials, including its history, purpose and values statements and its results communication of 24 October 2025; Stock Exchange of Mauritius records; business press reporting. Sector list compiled from publicly described group activities.