THE Wendel family, one of France’s most prominent industrial dynasties – which once made cannons for Louis XIV – has put its North Sea oil company up for sale in a desperate bid to raise cash after debt-fuelled investments soured, threatening to make it one of the most high-profile casualties of the global financial crisis.

Wendel Investissement, the buyout firm controlled by the family, has quietly appointed Jefferies, the investment bank, to sell its oil company Oranje-Nassau for up to $750m (£509m). The sale would be one of the largest in the North Sea in recent years and provide a much-needed windfall for Wendel. The firm saw its credit rating slashed to “junk” status in October after the value of its biggest investments, including a 21% stake in the building-materials giant Saint-Gobain, plummeted.

Jefferies has sent out teaser documents to potential bidders for the Dutch-based group, which has stakes in some of the leading fields in the North Sea, including Buzzard, the biggest find of the past decade. Interest is expected to be high for the company, which produces about 18,000 barrels a day. It has virtually no debt and generated €202m (£182m) net profit in 2007. Interested bidders are thought to include Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national oil group, Marubeni, the Japanese conglomerate, and partners in its oilfields.

Wendel’s poor performance led to a public revolt last summer within the Wendel family, whose beginnings stretch back to 1704 when its founder began buying iron forges in the Lorraine region of France. Sophie Boegner, a family member, launched a legal action against several directors over a controversial deal that allowed them to buy 5% of the business at a discount, just as its fortunes worsened.

In October, Standard & Poor’s down-graded its credit rating to “junk” status after its loan-to-value ratio jumped to about 60%, well above the 40% that would allow it to retain investment grade. In a recent note, it said managers would have to take “significant actions in the short term to reduce debt levels”.

Baron Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the company’s long-time patriarch who oversaw its transformation into an aggressive private-equity-style investment firm, resigned last month as chairman of SLPS, the family holding company that controls Wendel, after a summit of 250 of the family’s more than 900 members. Jean-Bernard Lafonta, Seillière’s hand-picked chief executive and the first nonWendel to run the group, has also been criticised for loading the company with debt.

With oil at $40 a barrel, down from last summer’s high of $147, auctioning Oranje-Nassau looks like a desperate act. “They wouldn’t be doing this unless they had to,” said a source close to the situation.

At one point Wendel was the second-biggest publicly traded buyout firm in the world after 3i. Its largest three holdings are a 21% stake in Saint-Gobain, 27% of Bureau Veritas, and an 18% stake in Legrand, which it took over as part of a buyout group led by America’s KKR. The firm has lost more than half of its value in the past year as the value of its holdings, Saint-Gobain especially, sank.

The firm has remade itself before. After building up an iron empire centred on the city of Hayange in Lorraine, the family fled France in 1789 when the revolution took hold. Its assets were sold by the French state. François Wendel, the great-great-great grandfather of Seillière, got back in the family business in 1815 with the purchase of an iron forge in Moyeuvre.

The company later branched into steel, building up an enormous fortune for the ever-growing clan. In the 1970s, however, steel demand collapsed following the 1973 oil crisis. The French government converted state loans to equity and nationalised it in 1978.

Seillière had built up the business since then, but again saw it laid low in 2001 in the aftermath of the internet boom, leading him to turn it into a buyout firm.

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