French tycoon who went to jail for match fixing
Bernard Tapie 1943-2021
One of France’s most “colourful” public figures, Bernard Tapie, who has died aged 78, was a flamboyant business tycoon with a host of sidelines, said The Times. At various points, he was an actor, a singer, a yachtsman, a TV presenter and a government minister. In opinion polls in 1992, he emerged as the person most French people under 30 wanted to be president; and as the man French women most wanted to go to bed with. But he was perhaps best known as a litigant and a jailbird. In the 1990s, the sale of his controlling stake in Adidas sparked a complicated legal battle that was still dragging on when he died, and which became a political scandal known as L’Affaire Tapie. Before that, he had served time in prison for bribing opposing teams to lose matches against the Marseille football club he’d built up from nothing – and for embezzling the club’s funds. “Yet even when he was disgraced, people still admired him.”
Bernard Tapie was born in the working-class suburbs of Paris, the son of a plumber, and did not thrive at school. However, after national service he won a singing contest, and was signed by a record label. He had several hits in the 1960s, then moved to the US, where the entrepreneurial culture inspired him to go into business. In just a few years, he bought and sold about 50 failing firms, reviving some, asset-stripping others. Having made millions, he bought a string of houses, a 72-metre yacht, a cycling team (which twice won the Tour de France), Olympique de Marseille soccer club (which won the European Cup in 1993) and Adidas. In the meantime, he’d hosted his own business TV show, and caught the eye of François Mitterrand, who encouraged his political career and made him minister for urban affairs. But in the mid-1990s, it all came tumbling down, with the match-fixing scandal and L’Affaire Tapie.
The lawsuit stemmed from his claim that the state-owned bank Crédit Lyonnais had conned him when it oversaw the sale of his stake in Adidas, in 1993. The bank had sold it to a subsidiary, and in 2008 an arbitration panel ruled that it had undervalued the firm. Tapie was awarded s404m in compensation – leading to charges that the panel had been biased in his favour. Yet Christine Lagarde, the finance minister, decided not to appeal the ruling. She was found guilty of ministerial negligence in 2016, and in 2017 Tapie was ordered to repay the sum; he refused – and so the case wore on. For most of this time, he was barred from running businesses, so he found other diversions: he released a duet with a hip-hop artist in 1998, made his stage debut in 2000, and starred as a policeman in a long-running TV series from 2003. In 2017, he revealed that he had stomach cancer. At their next match, Marseille fans held banners reading: “Courage! We are with you boss.” Married twice, he is survived by his four children and his wife Dominique.