French business, sports tycoon
Early success followed by scandal
Bernard Tapie, a flamboyant French business tycoon who raced cars, starred on television, served in parliament and owned one of the country’s premier soccer clubs, becoming an object of national fascination even as he faced repeated scandals and went to prison for a bribery scheme, died Sunday at 78.
The cause was cancer, his family told La Provence, a Marseille newspaper that he had owned since 2012. Details on where he died were not immediately available.
Raised in the Paris suburbs, where his father worked at a refrigerator factory, Tapie became a multimillionaire before he was 40, buying ailing companies, stripping them of their assets and selling them for a profit. His holdings once included the health store chain La Vie Claire, tennis racket manufacturer Donnay and sportswear giant Adidas. “If there is one thing I know how to do,” he once declared, “it is making dough.”
Tapie used the proceeds to buy one of the world’s largest sailing yachts, a roughly 240-foot schooner called the Phocea; finance a cycling team that won two consecutive Tour de France titles; and acquire a lacklustre soccer club, Olympique de Marseille, that he grew into a national and European champion.
Tanned and jowly, with bushy eyebrows and dark wavy hair, he was sometimes described as the French Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media mogul who ran the A.C. Milan soccer club and served four times as prime minister.
Tapie was elected to the French parliament that year as a deputy from Marseille, and was soon ranked in polls as one of the country’s most popular politicians.
He briefly served as urban affairs minister in President François Mitterrand’s cabinet and was cited as a potential successor, with rumoured ambitions to move into the Élysée Palace.
But the “Zorro of business,” as French newspapers called him, saw his fortunes evaporate in the mid-1990s, when he was declared bankrupt by a French court, convicted of tax evasion and found guilty of offering bribes to three soccer players in a match-rigging scheme. Tapie spent six months in prison in 1997 for the bribery conviction and was banned from French soccer for life.