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French producer and writer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean Chalopin (born 31 May 1950) is a French businessman, banker and former television producer.[1] In 1971, he founded the production company DIC Entertainment, which specialized in children-oriented television and film productions. Through the company, he co-created successful television series including Inspector Gadget (which grew into a namesake media franchise), The Real Ghostbusters, Sonic Underground, and Dennis the Menace; he also served as the co-writer and producer of The Mysterious Cities of Gold. He created a successor company, C&D in 1987.[2] DIC was dissolved into Cookie Jar Group in 2013, and he has since shifted focus onto a career in banking.
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In 1968, Chalopin formed an advertising company named the Office de Gestion et d'Action Publicitaire (OGAP, Office of Management and Advertising Action).[3] In 1971, with the backing of Radio Television Luxembourg, Chalopin renamed the company to Diffusion Information Commercial (DIC, Commercial Information Dissemination) which later evolved into DIC Entertainment. At DIC, he wrote, developed and produced programmes animated by overseas studios.[4][5] DIC's first major series were the French-Japanese co-productions Ulysses 31 and The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which Chalopin produced and co-wrote. Subsequently, he co-created Inspector Gadget together with Andy Heyward and Bruno Bianchi; its launch in 1983, concurrently with The Littles, marked DIC's foray into the American marketplace.
In 1987, Chalopin founded the company Créativité et Développement, aka C&D (eng: Creativity and Development), after selling his shares in DIC, and continued to produce cartoons in the late 1980s and 1990s. C&D had offices in Paris and Tokyo while setting up Jetlag Productions as its American affiliated company.[6] C&D had purchased the DIC library foreign distribution rights from Saban Entertainment soon after Saban had acquired them from DIC in 1987.[4] In 1996, Chalopin sold the C&D library to Fox Kids Worldwide, while the company itself was absorbed into Saban International Paris.[6]
After moving to the Bahamas in 1987, Chalopin began investing in Deltec Bank and Trust, eventually becoming its largest shareholder and chairman. As chairman he sought out smaller cryptocurrency-related businesses, including Tether and its controlling company Bitfinex in 2018. At that time, Deltec was the only bank willing to work with the cryptocurrency.[7]
Chalopin acquired Farmington State Bank (FSB), a single-location community bank in Farmington, Washington, in 2020. FSB, which until then had focused on agricultural loans, began to offer services to the blockchain and cannabis industries under the name Moonstone Bank. Among FSB's blockchain activities, it accepted millions of dollars in investment capital and deposits from entities linked to the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. US federal prosecutors seized FTX-related funds from the bank in January 2023 after FTX's failure, and FSB announced that it would return to community banking. Later that year FSB agreed to sell its operations and liquidate at the insistence of the Federal Reserve Board and state bank regulators.[8]
* = head writer
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