OBITUARY
Bernard Tapie obituary
Scandal-ridden French tycoon, politician and, eventually, jailbird who famously bought Adidas and the Marseilles football club
Bernard Tapie holds an Adidas shoe on an election campaign at a market in March 1992
Bernard Tapie, charismatic rogue, was the most colourful and extraordinary public figure in France of his time. By turns or simultaneously, he was a business tycoon, pop singer, left-wing politician, minister, jailbird, brilliant football manager, star TV presenter and actor in feature films and plays.
In the 1980s he became an idol of yuppies as the showman entrepreneur who took over moribund firms, gave them new life, and made millions. In two national opinion polls in 1992, he came top in one as the person most people under 30 wanted to be president; in the other, as the man French women most wanted to go to bed with. He had good looks, a winning smile and a witty outspokenness that thrilled his public. His powers of persuasion helped him to win big loans from banks for his business ventures. And he became a friend and protégé of President Mitterrand, who was fascinated by his self-confident bravura and for some years prevented inquiries into his shadier practices.
But then the storm broke. Tapie had built up the feeble football club Marseilles into Franceâs best. Later he was charged with bribing its opponents and embezzling 101 million francs of its money, and for this and other offences was given several jail sentences. One was for hitting a policeman: he was often unruly. Yet even when disgraced, many people still admired him. His life was one long confidence trick, epitomising the corrupt climate of that period.
Bernard Roger Tapie was a self-made man, born in the working-class Paris suburb of Le Bourget, the son of a domestic heating technician. He did badly at school, then tried without success to be a singer, footballer and racing cyclist, though his team, La Vie Claire, would later win the Tour de France twice.
Having raised money to start a business he began to buy up failing companies. He said that his aim was to revive them and thus create new jobs. In some cases he did so. In others, he stripped their assets and let them collapse. He grew rich, bought a 75m yacht, Phocea, and in 1990 was able to acquire for a rumoured ÂŁ250 million the faltering German sportswear giant Adidas.
Tapie had never thought of entering politics, but Mitterrand talked him into it, first persuading him in 1989 to duel with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader, in a televised debate. Tapie brilliantly defeated his skilful opponent, thus winning hordes of fans on the left. He became a non-aligned deputy for the Marseilles area, and in 1992 was named minister for urban affairs. He had to resign when the first of the many financial scandals blew up, but soon he was reappointed. In this period he proposed a scheme for youth employment, another for training immigrants.
In 1986 Tapie had bought the Marseilles club. He acquired star players; also some star managers such as Franz Beckenbauer, but few of these stayed long, for Tapie would interfere in training as if he himself were manager, telling the players what to do. He was passionate about the team, which won five French championships and in 1993 beat AC Milan to take the European Cup, a first for France. Tapie was lauded in Marseilles and across the country. âIt is my trophy, I won it myself,â he said with typical self-effacement.
Then trouble began. Tapie had earlier taken a huge loan from the state-owned Crédit Lyonnais to finance his ventures; but when the bank ran into heavy trouble, it tried to reclaim his debt of 1.2 billion francs. He was evasive, so in 1994 (by which time he had been forced to sell his stake in Adidas) the bank won a court order to freeze his priceless collection of Louis XV furniture. A bizarre saga ensued, when bailiffs came to his Paris mansion at dawn to take the antiques, but found his own lorry about to cart them away. In the resulting chase, some of the booty was seized. Tapie, furious, was arrested for insulting the police.
Barely a month later, with Mitterrandâs backing, Tapie stood in the European elections at the head of his own small party, Energie Radicale. To general amazement, this won 12 per cent of the French vote, only 2 per cent less than the Socialists. Polls were now showing Tapie as third favourite for the French presidency. However, the national assembly voted by a huge majority to lift his parliamentary immunity, thus making prosecution easier. In 1995 he went on trial for having arranged for handsome bribes to be paid to members of another football team, Valenciennes, to âplay gentlyâ against Marseilles in a French League game just before the European Cup match. Tapie was found guilty, sentenced to eight months in prison, and later given another penalty for embezzling Marseillesâs funds.
With Mitterrand now retired, the French judiciary threw its full weight against Tapie. Among various sentences, he was given six months in prison (plus 12 suspended) for tax evasion, and 30 months suspended for bankruptcy and for misuse of funds regarding his yacht Phocea. Yet always he denied guilt and appealed: he and his lawyers played an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with French justice, using every trick in the legal book to avoid his actually going to prison. Finally he did go inside, for five months, at Marseilles.
By then, he had played a starring role â amusingly, as a lawyer â in a feature film directed by Claude Lelouch, Men, Women, a Userâs Manual. In 1999, he appeared on the Paris stage in a version of One Flew Over the Cuckooâs Nest, playing the Jack Nicholson part of a cunning crook who feigns madness to escape a jail term. Acting, said the cynics, had always been his forte. He also found time to record a duet with a leading rap singer and to appear on a radio chat show as a kind of agony uncle.
Tapie was always a man of complex motives and confused ideas. Could this ruthless tycoon, it was asked, be sincerely a man of the left? With his simple origins he mistrusted the upper-crust world of wealth and power, and he wanted to help the underprivileged: hence his support for youth employment and immigrants. He fought elections on a strongly pro-European platform and called himself a Euro-federalist: hating the French official world, he was keen to see its power whittled down. He was an eager member of the European parliament, which repaid him by voting not to lift his immunity, even after the assembly in Paris had done so.
He left his first wife, Michele, in 1970 and is survived by his second wife, Dominique, whom he married in 1987, and by four children, Laurent, Nathalie, Stéphane and Sophie. This year he and Dominique were the victims of a violent burglary at their home in Combs-la-Ville, near Paris, during which he was badly beaten up and valuables were stolen.
His legal battle with CrĂ©dit Lyonnais and the French state continued to rage. Tapie claimed he had been cheated on the sale price of Adidas and in 2008 won a controversial settlement of âŹ403 million which, it was later alleged, President Sarkozy and allies had pushed for to end the case. The payout from public coffers caused outrage and in 2015 he was ordered to repay it after a court found he had in fact not been defrauded. The appeals process is continuing.
Tapie would always claim that his woes were due to an establishment plot against him, an unholy alliance of politicians, police and judiciary. He could use his charm and his oratory to make out that he was doing brilliantly well, when really he was on the verge of disaster. The left was indulgent to him, but the right and the business world resented him. Le Figaroâs editor, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, called him âthe prince of swagger, a loud-mouthed guttersnipeâ.
Yet for many ordinary French people he was a folk hero, especially in Marseilles, âthe city of his heartâ.
Bernard Tapie, businessman, politician and showman, was born on January 26, 1943. He died of stomach cancer on October 3, 2021, aged 78